The Biggest Health Care Heist That You've Probably Never Heard OF

What if I told you that cartels and other bad actors from around the world conspired to undermine the integrity of the health care system in the U.S. and came way too close to succeeding? If you didn’t hear about the bust of 324 people; the U.S.-based cartel shell medical supply companies; the pill mills pushing opioids; the doctors on the take; or how law enforcement captured many of the bad guys at the U.S. border and airports as they rushed to escape, that’s understandable. The feds revealed this potential $14.6 billion "depth charge" planted inside the Medicaid, Medicare, and private insurance programs in June, while most people were away on summer vacation.

$3 billion fraud payments to fake companies...another $10 billion earmarked.....all sourced to “..shit hole countries and the shithole doctors...” that hail from them....Lowell1775 paraphrase.

Culture matters.
They are not like us.

But what do I know and I do not feel that strongly about it.

Ultimately it is useless to prosecute these criminals. The only fix that is effective is to get the government altogether out of the healthcare field. That goes for education, too, and land management, and environment and everything else the government has devised to pay bureaucrats and scammers our tax money.

The USA makes it easy by filtering the assets of America through government agencies and rules. Bureaucrats are the opposite from businessmen. They make their money by giving away gobs of citizens money. The greater the “loss: in their business, the greater the “profit” to them personally. That is a sort of capitalism with the Government being far the greatest monopoly.

According to the DOJ, overseas cartel thieves set up a sophisticated network of medical supply companies that “submitted more than $10 billion in fraudulent healthcare claims to Medicare.” The bad guys used stolen identities of at least one million Americans found in data breaches and sold on the dark web to make the reimbursement requests. It’s unclear if the thieves used the unique Medicare and Medicaid identifying numbers to steal the money.

Other scams used a network of Phoenix-based sober living houses to demand government payments for people who never got addiction treatment at the facilities. The facilities, run by ProMD, received $560 million before the feds caught on to the scam.

In Atlanta, medical professionals ordered skin grafts for dying patients who didn’t need them. By the time the grift was discovered, they’d scammed Medicare out of $760 million.

People from as far away as Estonia have been arrested. Seven people were found trying to scuttle over the southern U.S. border but were stopped before they got away. Another bunch were caught trying to leave the country from U.S. airports.

The bad actors from Russia, Pakistan, and Eastern Europe used the American health care system like their “personal piggy bank,” the Department of Justice’s Acting Criminal Division leader, Matthew Galeotti, said. He said that “this was a staggering breach of trust” and they “will prosecute these criminals as aggressively as we would any drug dealer because that’s exactly what they are.”

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