Free Republic

As fraud concerns ramp up across the country, particularly involving Medicaid, North Carolina State Auditor Dave Boliek told Fox News Digital the problem is very real in his state, especially when it comes to autism therapy, an area that has been highly scrutinized in Minnesota. Boliek is sounding the alarm on potential waste, fraud and abuse within the state’s Medicaid program, specifically noting in an interview with Fox News Digital a 47,000% explosion in autism therapy billings he has flagged since taking office last year. "Those are vital services to folks and individuals that need that therapy," Boliek said. "But...

Medicaid is the joint federal/state program that provides free medical care to the poor and near-poor in the U.S. Who could be against that? A website called Statista collects data on various subjects of interest and presents them in useful charts. One subject is the total federal plus state spending on the Medicaid program by year since inception of the program back in the 1960s through the latest year of 2024. Here is that chart: Looking at the chart, a few things leap out. One is rapid and unbroken growth year after year from the beginning up to the most...

When the scale of the Medicaid fraud in Minnesota started to emerge, our first thought was that, if it’s that easy to rip off Medicaid, the North Star State can’t be the only place where it’s happening. Turns out we were right, as the Daily Wire’s exposé of massive fraud schemes in Ohio makes clear. Which means there are almost certainly still more to be uncovered. Which leads to the question of why we are learning about this only now. Daily Wire is releasing a five-part series that alleges massive fraud in an Ohio Medicaid program – a state that...

(This is the third part of “Medicaid Millions,” a Daily Wire series exposing billions of dollars in dubious “personal services” payments where people are paid to spend time with their own family.) COLUMBUS, Ohio — After the federal government approved a waiver allowing Ohio to expand Medicaid by paying housekeepers to spend time at elderly people’s houses to help with tasks like “homemaking” and “chore services,” taxpayers across the country footed a shocking $2.5 billion worth of bills between 2018 and 2024, according to a trove of Medicaid data released for the first time by the Trump administration. The demand...

Sunday night’s episode of The Weekend: Primetime on MS NOW launched a predictable attack on Nebraska’s new Medicaid work requirements. Equally predictable was the "expert" MS NOW chose: NYU professor Sherry Glied — a former top Obama HHS official deeply involved in rolling out Obamacare. Glied spent most of the segment warning about coverage losses and hardship. Only toward the end did Glied let the liberal cat out of the bag: “It’s not a great idea, in my opinion, to have work requirements for anything.”Get the rest of the story and view the video here.

Polls show Americans are angry – and rightly so – at accelerating medical bills. Meanwhile, the insurers and hospitals keep raking in record profits. UnitedHealthcare just reported jumbo profits so far in 2026, and in 2025, it recorded revenues of more than $400 billion. It is raking in profits from the $1.9 trillion in federal healthcare programs. Two of the largest "nonprofit" hospital chains, Kaiser Permanente and HCA Healthcare, recorded nearly $200 billion in assets at the end of 2024. As Republican Rep. Jason Smith (MO-8), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, put it: "Hospitals are charging an...

Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the agency overseeing Medicaid and Medicare, announced Tuesday that his agency’s anti-fraud effort will come to every state. During an interview at a Politico-hosted event, Oz said that every U.S. state can expect anti-fraud activities involving funds received through the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid (CMS).“We are going to announce this week that all 50 states are going to be requested to give us a plan over the next 30 days of how they’re going to re-validate providers in high-risk areas in their states,” Oz said.Oz explained that it would involve proving whether individuals...

The UNC Sheps Center, which tracks rural hospital infrastructure in the United States, has documented 195 rural hospitals that have closed or converted to outpatient facilities since January 2005. Six are in Pennsylvania. Closures have far outpaced the opening of new rural hospitals during this period. As a physician who has trained in rural communities and a researcher who studies community well-being and public health, we see that every rural hospital closure exerts a domino effect on surrounding communities and residents. This can be difficult to quantify but manifests as lost jobs and economic decline, poorer health and a pervasive...

Abdirashid Ismail Said was the centerpiece of Attorney General Keith X. Ellison’s attempt to pretend that he was also being tough on Somali fraud. Since Said had already been convicted of Medicaid fraud in 2022, he should never have been allowed to bill Medicaid for anything. And once he was charged, he should never have been released on bail. But he was and did and now he’s on the run, and we’re all supposed to pretend that Ellison tried really hard and just couldn’t figure things out. The Minnesota Attorney General announced in December 2023 that Said is responsible for...

MINNEAPOLIS — Abdirashid Said is the original Personal Care Assistant company fraudster who stole taxpayer money while claiming to operate out of a mailbox at an office on Central Avenue in Northeast Minneapolis. After he was convicted in 2021 and ordered to have nothing to do with companies that receive Medicaid money, other PCA companies took his place at the Central Avenue office. And Said started receiving checks from them. "Were those checks for employment for you, Mr. Said?" former state prosecutor Steve Forrest asked at a probation violation hearing. "No, they were for loans," Said said. Said claimed the...

A federal court rejected Minnesota’s attempt to restart Medicaid funding that the Trump administration had halted over concerns people are stealing the money, with the judge saying even the state has acknowledged it has a “serious fraud problem.” Judge Eric Tostrud, a Trump appointee, said Minnesota may still prevail later in the case, but for now the feds are on relatively solid legal footing in deferring more than $250 million in Medicaid money to prod the state to combat fraud. “Though Minnesota credibly complains that the federal government’s deferral is historically unprecedented in its size and timing, I conclude on...

It turns out the over 100 women from Turkey who flew over to America to have their babies then signed up for Medicaid So not only did their kids get birthright citizenship but then the American taxpayer had to pay for the procedure and follow up care End Birthright Citizenship

What do you get when you cross the Corleone crime family with the Sopranos pulling off a heist even bigger than the Lucchese crime family's multimillion-dollar Lufthansa caper in 1978? I dunno, but it's got nothin' on California. If you haven't already read Rick Moran's excellent "Gavin Newsom, 'The Celebrated Jumping Fraud King of Calaveras County'," open that in a new tab, take a gander, then come back here. Because when I first read Rick's piece, I thought, "That's some massive theft going on, but how big is it, really?"Longtime Sharp VodkaPundit Readers™ know I can't look at the big...

President Donald Trump on Wednesday said it's "not possible" for the federal government to fund Medicare, Medicaid and child care costs, arguing that it should be up to the states to "take care" of those programs while the federal government focuses on military spending.

States are paying contractors such as Deloitte, Accenture, and Optum millions of dollars to help them comply with the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — a law that will strip safety-net health and food benefits from millions. State governments rely on such companies to design and operate computer systems that assess whether low-income people qualify for Medicaid or food aid through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly referred to as food stamps. Those state systems have a history of errors that can cut off benefits to eligible people, a KFF Health News investigation showed. These benefits, provided to the poorest...

BREAKING: 4 individuals sentenced to federal prison after carrying out a $12.7 MILLION "Minnesota-Somali-style" Medicaid fraud scheme in North Carolina. The scammers operated a company called "Life Touch," which lured patients into unnecessary treatments and then billed Medicaid with fake claims. This fraud needs to be rooted out EVERYWHERE Image from X post: 4 individuals involved in Medicaid fraud scheme.

A man accused of running a fraudulent autism center in Minnesota also purchased a semi truck with the money received from state services, prosecutors say. Abdinajib Yussuf pleaded guilty on Monday, March 2nd to one count of wire fraud. According to CBS, Yussuf opened Star Autism Center in St. Cloud Minnesota in 2020, claiming to provide one on one therapy to children with autism. A federal indictment states that Yussuf recruited parents to enroll their children into his center, even if they were not actually diagnosed with autism. If the parents agreed, Yussuf would work with a professional to qualify...

Gov. Tim Walz denounced the Trump administration’s latest threat to withhold federal funds from Minnesota as another step in a “retribution” campaign as he unveiled a package of legislation Thursday intended to fight fraud in public programs, a persistent problem that provided an impetus for the federal government’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota. The Democratic governor made the announcement a day after Vice President JD Vance said the administration would “temporarily halt” some Medicaid funding to Minnesota over fraud concerns, as part of what he described as an aggressive drive against the misuse of public funds. Walz’s proposals were in the...

In the wake of Vice President JD Vance and Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, announcing that some Medicaid funding going toward Minnesota would be paused due to fraud concerns, Governor Tim Walz claimed that "the person who’s angriest about this fraud is me." "I don’t know why this is so hard to understand, and I will continue to say this. You can trust me on this. The person who’s angriest about this fraud is me. There is certainly no political upside to having fraud in your state, and it undermines the very...

Beyond all reckoning, the goofy DOGE geniuses did it! It’s done. For six years, they guarded this data like the nuclear codes. Yesterday, DOGE slapped it on the internet, ribbon-wrapped for Valentine’s Day. DOGE —whose death was obviously slightly exaggerated— just dropped a tactical nuke on both the vaccine debate and welfare fraud— and launched the biggest crowdsourcing project in human history. Yesterday, Axios ran the story headlined, “Elon Musk declares victory with Medicaid data release.”