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Posted on 07/02/2026 5:05:49 AM PDT by Red Badger
There are 64 Medicaid-funded social adult daycare centers packed into a single one-mile radius of Flushing, Queens. Not 64 in the borough. Not 64 in the city. Sixty-four within walking distance of each other, according to a new CBS News data analysis that found the densest cluster of such facilities anywhere in the country. Federal investigators have noticed, and they are asking the question any taxpayer with a pulse would ask.
“[It] begs the question: How many social adult daycare centers do you need?” said Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, in the CBS report.
The answer, if the billing records are to be believed, is that Flushing needs enough capacity to serve more than 90 percent of every Medicaid-eligible senior in the neighborhood. That is what these facilities collectively bill for.
Think about what that number implies. Nine out of every ten poor seniors in one Queens neighborhood are supposedly showing up for taxpayer-funded meals, activities, and personal care. Either Flushing is home to the most socially active elderly population in American history, or a great many of those seniors exist primarily as line items on a claim form.
The trend line makes the honest explanation even harder to sustain. From 2018 to 2024, the neighborhood’s Medicaid-eligible senior population grew about 20 percent, right in line with the rest of the country. The number of seniors billed by its adult daycares grew 390 percent over the same period. Statewide, New York’s taxpayer bill for these facilities nearly quadrupled. Medicaid paid adult daycare providers $3.35 billion nationwide in 2024, and 17 percent of it flowed to New York’s 375 facilities, more than any other state in the union.
Federal authorities confirmed to CBS that investigations are underway across New York into whether the explosive spread of these centers reflects fraud, with potential federal action anticipated.
We Already Know How the Scheme Works
This is not speculation about a hypothetical crime. The mechanics of adult daycare fraud in New York City have already been laid out in federal charging documents, and they are as brazen as anything in the annals of welfare theft.
In February, federal prosecutors charged two Queens men, including a Flushing pharmacy owner who also operated two social adult daycare centers, in an alleged $120 million scheme against Medicare and Medicaid. Prosecutors say the defendants lured elderly enrollees with illegal cash payments, billed for services that were medically unnecessary or never provided, and at times submitted claims exceeding their facilities’ permitted capacity. One defendant allegedly coordinated the bribes by text message, instructing a co-conspirator to distribute $10,000 in cash to enrollees. The government says they pulled large sums out of bank accounts they controlled just to keep the kickback pipeline flowing.
In January, two defendants pleaded guilty in a separate $68 million Brooklyn scheme built on the same chassis. According to the investigation, most of the Medicaid recipients enrolled at the two daycares involved never actually attended. They were paid cash kickbacks while the facilities billed the government for phantom services. In some cases, investigators found, the “clients” were outside the United States on the dates the facilities claimed to be serving them.
Pay seniors to sign up. Bill the government whether they show up or not. Launder the proceeds. Repeat. When a business model that lucrative goes largely unpunished, it multiplies, and 64 centers in a one-mile radius is what multiplication looks like.
New York’s Oversight Theater
Confronted with the CBS findings, a spokesperson for the New York State Department of Health pointed to new tracking processes, enhanced compliance reviews, and the fact that the agency has referred 387 centers for investigation since 2021, with about a third elevated to the attorney general for law enforcement action.
Read that defense again, because it is actually a confession. The state’s own health department flagged nearly 400 of these centers as suspicious in five years, and the taxpayer bill quadrupled anyway. Referrals are not results. A tracking process that tracks the money out the door is not oversight. It is bookkeeping for a heist.
The timing here is delicious in a bitter sort of way. One day before the CBS report landed, the Trump administration suspended federal funding for New York’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit, the office housed under Attorney General Letitia James that is supposed to prosecute exactly this kind of theft. The HHS inspector general’s letter said the unit secured the lowest number of criminal fraud convictions among similarly sized state units from 2023 through 2025. James called the move “another political distraction” and touted more than $627 million in recoveries since 2019, and her defenders will frame the suspension as defunding the fraud fighters.
But the Flushing numbers are the rebuttal. If New York’s fraud-fighting apparatus were functioning, a single neighborhood could not bill Medicaid for nine out of ten of its eligible seniors while enrollment quintupled against flat population growth. The most generous reading is that the unit prioritizes big civil settlements over criminal deterrence. The result either way is the same. The people running these schemes have concluded, rationally, that the odds favor them.
And this is not a New York peculiarity. CBS’s earlier reporting found an extreme concentration of red-flag hospices in Los Angeles County, where California prosecutors charged 21 suspects in April in an alleged $267 million hospice fraud. Federal prosecutors in Minnesota say billions may have been lost across several high-risk programs there. The common thread is not geography. It is one-party blue-state governance that treats every dollar of program growth as compassion and every question about that growth as cruelty.
The Real Victims Are the Ones the Program Was Built For
The deepest offense here is not fiscal, though the fiscal offense is real. Social adult daycare exists for genuinely isolated, frail, and disabled people who need a hot meal and human contact. Every dollar siphoned into a kickback envelope is a dollar that does not reach them, and every phantom enrollee erodes public willingness to fund the program at all. The fraudsters are not merely stealing from taxpayers. They are strip-mining the moral capital that makes any safety net politically sustainable.
Scripture has always understood that this kind of theft is a sin against the vulnerable, not just the treasury.
The people of the land have used oppression, and exercised robbery, and have vexed the poor and needy: yea, they have oppressed the stranger wrongfully. — Ezekiel 22:29
The federal investigation into New York’s adult daycare industry should follow the Flushing money wherever it leads, and Albany should be made to explain, under oath if necessary, how it watched this bill quadruple while its referrals gathered dust. Sixty-four centers in one square mile did not happen by accident. Someone built that. Now someone should have to answer for it.
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Another day, another fraud. We are Nigeria.
No, Nigeria came here..................
Lear something new everyday.
Whitey is such a sucker.
The Rubber Stamping must be outlawed
It wouldn't if Biden or Harris had been elected.
...and how many dollars are then funneled back to their Democrat enablers?
I'd like to know how many of these fraudsters are here curtesy of George Soros and his filthy 'hate America' organizations. And HOW MANY OF THE FRAUDSTERS DONATE TO THE DEMOCRAT PARTY. We're not Nigeria yet...we can still fight back.
A scheming Flushing pharmacy owner operated two social
adult daycare centers, and colluded with two Queens men
<><>they made off w/ an alleged $120 million scheme against Medicare and Medicaid.
<><>they lured elderly unsuspecting enrollees using illegal cash payments,
<><>they billed for medically unnecessary services
<><>they pocketed tax dollars for services they never provided,
<><>they submitted claims that exceeded their facilities’ permitted capacity.
<><>they colluded with each other via text message
<><>they coordinated the bribes,
<><>they instructed a co-conspirator to distribute $10,000 in cash to enrollees.
<><>they pulled large sums out of bank accounts they controlled
<><>as a ruse to keep the kickback pipeline flowing.
I guess they need all of those “daycare centers” for the spawn they are producing.
Man, if only govt upheld/enforced the Law and defended the Rights of the People all this would be a thought experiment (HINT: NOBODY is obligated to another).
Wake me when the faux-dichotomy wishes to actually SOLVE issues vs. harumph about the others’ crimes/ineptitude.
The scheming Flushing pharmacy owner operated two social adult daycares and pocketed an alleged $120 million scheme from Medicare and Medicaid. Betcha the crook knows plenty about stealing from Medicare’s pharmacy program. L/E needs to determine what the Flushing daycare cheat knows about pharmacy Medicare frauds.
Pharmacy Medicare fraud occurs
<><>when pharmacies, pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), or related entities
<><>collude to deliberately deceive the Medicare program
<><>they cheat to steal unearned, inflated government reimbursements.
The most common types of pharmacy-related Medicare fraud schemes include:
1. Billing for Medication Never Dispensed (”Phantom Billing”) A pharmacy bills Medicare Part D for a drug that the patient never picked up, requested, or was prescribed. Pharmacies keep the medication on the shelf to resell it while pocketing the government reimbursement, billing Medicare Part D for drugs that were never actually provided to patients.
2. Auto-Refill Fraud: Automatically refilling prescriptions without the patient’s authorization or knowledge. When a patient stops taking a drug, the pharmacy intentionally fails to stop the auto-refill sequence. Medicare is consistently billed for chronic care drugs that accumulate unused in patients’ homes or are entirely abandoned.
3. Prescription Drug Switching Definition: Dispensing a cheaper medication while billing Medicare for a more expensive version. A generic alternative or a completely different, lower-cost drug is handed over to the patient.The pharmacy submits a claim for a premium brand-name or highly priced medication to absorb the financial spread.
4. Offering incentives to doctors, telemarketers, or patients to route prescriptions through a specific pharmacy. Pharmacies buy “doctor orders” or pay marketing companies to obtain Medicare beneficiary numbers. This forces the generation of highly expensive, medically unnecessary prescriptions (e.g., compound creams, footbaths) to bill the taxpayers.
5. Compounding Pharmacy Schemes: Fraudulently manufacturing custom-mixed medications at massive scale purely to trigger high Medicare payouts. Bribed medical providers write scripts for unnecessary, non-FDA-approved compounded products like pain or scar creams. These tailored drugs bypass standard pricing caps, often costing Medicare thousands of dollars per single tube.
6. PBM Overcharging and Pricing Manipulation: Corporate Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) manipulating drug pricing metrics reported to federal healthcare programs. Inflating the “usual and customary” prices or hiding manufacturer rebates instead of passing the savings to Medicare. A federal court penalized CVS Caremark nearly $290 million following whistle-blower evidence that the PBM consistently overcharged Medicare for prescription drugs.
I am so tired of all this fraud that has been going on, apparently for years! I am tired of Americans paying out the nose on our taxes just so foreigners can come here and live off of it! Where is all the outrage from the majority of Americans? Why aren’t we up in arms and demanding every single foreign fraudster be deported back to their country? Thune is not a leader...he is a place holder that can’t do the job!
The real problem is the govt employees who allow this fraud. The most attention needs to be on the bureaucrats who enable the fraud. There must be kickbacks galore. There need to be prosecutions of these criminals in govt.
There is one in Tarrant County (Texas y’all) that a town built and opened about 1.5 years ago. It is a large complex with a indoor swimming pool.
I toured it last summer after having knee surgery to see what it is about and read over their paper work.
It is only for people 50+ years old and their care takers.
One pays for use by their Medicaid/Medicare insurance. It is not known how much the municipality bills the government.
Originally its hours of operation were Monday through Friday from 8-5. Now it is open six days a week.
It has a very large parking lot on three sides of the building and it is always mostly full.
My comment to others is that there are more old people there than in Branson, MO.
“...and how many dollars are then funneled back to their Democrat enablers?”
My guess (Speculation) 20% to 30%.
…And they’re all full of enrollees—so you can’t get in—but no one is ever there.
What this shows is that our Welfare State has decayed into a massive system of fraud where scammers are simply looking for opportunities to rip it off and no one is either able to or cares enough to stop them. Or, worse yet, the government bureaucrats are in on the scam because they parachute out of government jobs into cushy NGO jobs that benefit from the scam. The whole system needs a massive overhaul or needs to be terminated. But Congress doesn’t have the balls to do what needs to be done.
Thune needs to be replaced. He is a low IQ pol.
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