Healthcare fraud keeps fleecing taxpayers — with the latest costing a full $1 billion
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Just when you think you’ve seen the most shocking case of health-care fraud at taxpayer expense, another comes along to jolt you yet again.
This time, it’s a massive Medicare scam run by an overseas mob — possibly linked to the Kremlin — that got away with $1 billion of federal money, a new federal indictment charges.
The scheme, which began during the Biden administration, had low-level foreign nationals fly to America and purchase more than 30 medical-supply companies, feds say.
They then used the stolen credentials of 7,000 physicians and more than 1 million Medicare recipients to submit a jaw-dropping $10.6 billion in fraudulent Medicare claims.
The crooks wound up netting nearly $1 billion in hard cash, which they then allegedly laundered through China, Israel, Pakistan, Singapore and Turkey.
Authorities nabbed some of the mob’s foot soldiers, but it’s not clear who actually ran the operation — and got the money. Yet experts believe top officials in Russia must have been tied to it.
Especially after Medicare recipients who saw the fraudulent billing — for catheters, for example, they never received — reported what they saw?
And this comes on the heels of a report Saturday from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services boss Mehmet Oz that a 1 million Obamacare enrollees lack Social Security numbers, and yet none of the paper-pushers who police the program had said boo.
The men slammed their predecessors for dismantling Obamacare “integrity guardrails, while partisan lawfare blocked common sense efforts to protect taxpayers.”
As a result, they said, government has been paying people even though it has no idea “if they actually exist.”
That so many of these “people” have been getting subsidies suggests this was no mere oversight, but rather part of Democrats’ strategy: Pretend fraud doesn’t exist, and when Republicans look to eliminate it, paint them as heartless for denying needy Americans vital health care.
Last year, the Government Accountability Office revealed the results of a covert test that showed a whopping 90% of fake applications for enhanced COVID-era subsidies were OK’d even though they lacked required info, such as reported income, citizenship and — you guessed it — Social Security numbers.
Zero-premium policies have been a huge part of the problem, since crooked brokers can apply for them without an enrollee knowing, because no bills are sent out.
Indeed, most of these phantom enrollees (those who existed, that is) probably had other forms of insurance, but the brokers got commission and the insurance agencies got the premiums.
The sunset of those COVID subsidy enhancements last year may have helped curb some of the abuse, but Democrats shut down the government for six weeks in a bid to block their expiration.
Their argument? Republicans were denying Americans vital health care by not extending them: People were going to die!
Never mind that most of these “people” had other insurance (say, from an employer) — if they existed at all.
That’s a key problem driving all the fraud; recall that Dems lobbed the same false charges at Republicans for targeting fraud in the One Big Beautiful Bill: Medicaid cuts — stemming from a number of anti-fraud measures in the bill — would kill folks, they screamed.
Yet last week, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced a federal operation that collared 455 perps linked to as much as $6.5 billion in scams. That’s real taxpayer money.
Look: Obamacare alone costs taxpayers $112 billion a year, and clearly much of that stems from corruption.
Democrats who push for ever-greater health-care funding have a big stake in fighting fraud, since money that’s saved can be rerouted to those who truly need it.
Instead, they close their eyes to the abuse and play politics. And Americans pay the price.