DOJ uncovers $14.6 billion healthcare fraud that Biden missed

You have been robbed!!! Billions of dollars of your taxpayers’ money is gone. And it turns out that the “myth” of healthcare fraud—so often dismissed by Democrats as a right-wing talking point—just got a $14.6 billion reality check. In what the Department of Justice (DOJ) is calling the largest healthcare fraud takedown in U.S. history, more than 324 individuals, including 96 licensed medical professionals, were charged across 50 federal districts for their roles in a sprawling web of deceit, theft, and exploitation of the American healthcare system.

But let us not rush to celebrate just yet. While the Trump DOJ is deservedly taking bows, the real question is: Where was the Biden administration while this fraud metastasized into a multi-billion-dollar cancer?  The numbers are staggering:

• $14.6 billion in intended fraudulent losses.
• $2.9 billion in actual losses.
• $245 million in seized assets, including cash, crypto, and luxury cars.
• $4 billion in fraudulent claims stopped by CMS.
• 205 providers had their billing privileges suspended or revoked.

The schemes ranged from telemedicine scams and fake addiction treatment centers to transnational criminal rings laundering Medicare dollars through shell companies and cryptocurrency.

One particularly grotesque case involved a Pakistani national who allegedly conspired with 41 addiction clinics in Arizona to bill Medicaid for services never rendered – many of which targeted Native American communities and the homeless.

Another gem! “Operation Gold Rush,” a $10.6 billion scheme involving Russian and Estonian nationals who used stolen identities of over a million Americans to submit fake Medicare claims for urinary catheters. (That should piss you off.)  Nothing says “healthcare equity” like international crime syndicates billing Medicare for medical equipment no one ordered.

Attorney General Pamela Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel declared it a “decisive moment” in the fight against healthcare fraud. For sure, it’s a big bust, but let’s not forget that this fraud didn’t happen overnight. It festered for years under the noses of the Medicare and Medicaid bureaucrats – and while the Biden administration was busy assuring the American people that fraud in government-run healthcare was “rare” and “overblown.”  Apparently, $14.6 billion is just a rounding error when you’re spending trillions.

This isn’t just a failure of enforcement—it’s a failure of ideology. For years, Democrats have insisted that expanding government control over healthcare would not create a problem of waste, fraud, and abuse. They’ve mocked concerns about Medicare fraud as partisan fearmongering. And yet, here we are, with the largest fraud bust in American history.

Where was the oversight? Where were the audits? Where was the “most transparent administration in history” when foreign nationals were using AI-generated voice recordings to fake Medicare consent calls?

To their credit, the DOJ is now launching a Health Care Fraud Data Fusion Center to use AI and cloud computing to detect fraud. Why now and not three years ago, when these schemes were already in full swing? Why was the Trump administration able to again (referring to securing the border) do in months what the Biden administration was unable to do in years?

Let us be clear, every dollar stolen is a dollar not spent on real care for real patients – or maybe a dollar that Uncle Sam did not have to take from the taxpayers. Every fake claim undermines the integrity of programs like Medicare and Medicaid. And every time the government fails to detect fraud, it gives ammunition to those who argue that centralized healthcare is a bureaucratic disaster exposed to waste, fraud and abuse.  And honestly, can you blame them?

This takedown should be a moment of reckoning—not just for the criminals, but for the policymakers and bureaucrats who had allowed this fraud to develop and rage on through negligence, denial, and ideological blindness. The Biden administration cannot have it both ways. You certainly cannot keep telling the American people that fraud is “not a serious issue” when $14.6 billion walked out the door under your watch.

Healthcare fraud is not a fiction.  That should be kept in mind when those same Democrats tell us today that waste, fraud and abuse are not a problem in Medicaid. The next time someone tells you that healthcare fraud is a “myth,” point them to the 324 defendants now facing federal charges … or the one million stolen identities used to rip off we taxpayers. 

If this is what “rare” healthcare fraud looks like, I’d hate to see an example of what real fraud in Medicare and Medicaid might look like.  Oh, we just did.

So, there ‘tis.

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