It takes a special kind of mendacity to steal funds meant for sick and dying people, but some individuals are so greedy that they are willing to stoop that low to enrich themselves.
Finally, the Department of Justice has started to bring charges against these low-lives who are living high on purloined funds. The amount of money that was so far discovered to have been diverted from Medicare and Medicaid into these thieves’ pockets is staggering: $6.5 billion.
At a press conference this week, U.S. Attorney Todd Blanche said that 455 people in 45 states have been charged with healthcare fraud. That number includes 90 doctors and other licensed health care providers.
The fraud involved is breathtaking not only in its scope but in its maliciousness: “Some defendants allegedly ordered medically unnecessary tests. Others prescribed products that patients did not need. Some allegedly fueled opioid addiction to increase their own revenue,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennnedy, Jr. “In certain cases, patients allegedly died, all believing they were receiving legitimate Medicare medical care from providers who only view them …as billing opportunities.”
An investigation in Los Angeles found widespread fraud among some 1,800 hospice providers – with as many as 500 supposedly operating within a three-mile radius of each other.
According to the DOJ, eight people were arrested there in April and charged with scheming to steal more than $50 million from Medicare by setting up “sham hospice care facilities” that paid kickbacks to non-terminal individuals who allowed their names to be used on fraudulent claims, forged physician signatures, billed for services never rendered, and spent the ill-gotten money on luxury travel, restaurants and their private mortgage and car payments.
It is clear that the “checks and balances” that were supposedly in place to prevent this wholesale thievery were either non-existent or deliberately disabled. Everyone, it seems, looked the other way – the federal government, watchdog agencies, medical personnel and those involved in submitting and paying out billions of dollars in fraudulent claims.
Charging these criminals and sending them to jail is just the first step. The whole apparatus built around Medicare and Medicaid needs to be taken down and rebuilt while the DOJ claws back every cent it can get. This is not just “government money” that has been stolen. It’s money taken by force from hardworking American families in the form of taxes and from sick and dying individuals who most needed help.
These greedy betrayers of the public trust have already enjoyed their spoils. Show them no quarter.