deebska

This only scratches the surface. Medicaid and Medicare fraud it the tip of the iceberg. Just one example: There is multi-generational fraud in a number of ethnic communities. I was a fraud examiner after my military career and my partner, a nurse turned lawyer, and I found over 800 Medicaid fraud cases in less than 2 years (in 2013/14). Our threshold per case filing was $500K and we had dozens of cases over $5M in the aggregate. Guess how many of the cases the affected states took action on: 2. And Medicare was just as bad, but no Federal District Attorney under Obama would take a fraud case, especially if it was an immigrant or indigenous American Indian. I finally quit after banging my head against the government brick wall for 10 years. One of my last cases was identifying false "Blue Zones", which is a Demographic term (often co-opted by epidemiologists for what is typically called "supercentenarian clusters") for pockets of populations with a larger number than average folks that were 100 year old or older. We found areas in California, Texas, Colorado and Arizona where certain ethnic groups had sizable Blue Zones that were 6-25X higher than any ever recorded on the planet. It took only one case to break the code: an ethnic Chinese woman in NorCal was suing a hospital for giving her the wrong blood type during emergency surgery. We reviewed the records and after a single interview, we determined that she had assumed the ID (and medical history) of another Chinese immigrant who had passed away about 6 years previous. The original patient died at age 94, ostensibly making the fraudster 100 or 101. It was later determined that she was 58 or 59 years old. In addition to assuming the late patient's ID, she also assumed her Social Security payments as well as other benefits provided by the government, including food and housing. She paid 30% to a "community trust" which handled the fraud. She was offering to turn in others to avoid a lengthy jail term, but the State of California inexplicably dropped all the charges. Oh yeah, the patient that was suing wasn't the first generation of this fraud, she was the second. The original patient was believed to have passed away in 1989. Find any community that handles it's own deaths and burials and you will find the same thing. It happens on Indian reservations, in Chinese, East Asian and African communities. Normal at-home deaths are not reported to the state and the "community trusts" handle all burial and cremains repatriation. Another member of the community, usually illegal, but not always, assumes that person's ID and benefits; in many states, they will be admitted to an ethnically affiliated hospice care facility (on paper anyway) and that facility will get funds to care for a patient that only exists on paper. Rinse and repeat. We found one case in southern Arizona where one Native American man was carrying the IDs of six other men and collecting SS, VA, and various retirement pensions for all six of them. His was enrolled at 2 different hospices on Indian reservations 370 miles apart. His monthly payments were in excess of $36K and he got to keep half of that. We notified the State of Arizona and the local Congressional and Senate offices with no results and no action taken. And I have much worse examples. DOGE needs to be enshrined as a Cabinet-level position and we need biometric validation of everyone collecting federal or state benefits, as a start.