Free Republic

Editor's note: Welcome to the second installment of Corruption Watch, WC Dispatch's investigative series exposing the leftists, illegal aliens, and NGOs defrauding John Q. Taxpayer from coast to coast. We're proud to partner with Restoration News to amplify these on-the-ground investigations, beginning in Michigan. Read the first installment HERE What do a demolished building, a dental office, and an immigrant hub have in common? In Michigan, they’re all billing Medicaid, and you’re paying for it. We went looking for a lead. All we found was a demolition team eating lunch. That crew gave us information that sent us to 21...

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...

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...

This is a different type of hospice fraud. Seniors not aware they are in hospice (they aren't dying), neglected and defrauded when the home owner distributes their identity information to others who bill medicaid.DrOzCMS @DrOzCMSHospice fraud isn’t just about stealing your tax dollars – in some cases it’s about stealing your life. Federal and state authorities raided this illegal hospice ring in southern California earlier this month, but there are plenty more like it. We won’t rest until seniors and taxpayers are safe. March 18, 2026

The new White House task force will withhold government funding for state and local benefits programs if their anti-fraud controls are viewed as lacking. IT MODERNIZATION The White House is kicking off President Donald Trump’s “war on fraud” with a focus on federally-funded benefits like housing, food and cash assistance programs. Among the tactics that a new anti-fraud task force will be pursuing is withholding government funding to state and local jurisdictions whose anti-fraud controls for benefits are deemed inadequate and increasing data-sharing between states and the federal government, according to the Monday executive order establishing the task force. Both...

Investigative journalist Nick Shirley released his latest video on Monday, uncovering $170 million in fraud in California. And this is just the tip of the iceberg in Democrat-run California. “We uncovered over $170,000,000 in fraud as these fraudsters live in luxury with no consequences,” Nick Shirley said. “California’s version of Medicaid called ‘Medi-Cal’ has more than doubled since 2022 from $108 billion to a proposed $222 billion in 2026. Their population, however, has not grown exponentially. However, their spending has,” Nick Shirley said. “There has been a 1,000 percent increase in hospice care in Los Angeles County,” Nick Shirley said....

At age 69, Lynn Ianni is a pickleball whiz, zipping from dinks to drives energetically. When she suffered an injury on the court two years ago, she sought physical therapy, and was surprised to learn her Medicare insurance wouldn’t cover it. She was, according to Medicare records, dying and in hospice. - snip - “They said, ‘you're in hospice.’ And I said, ‘what? What are you talking about?” Ianni said. “‘Are you kidding me? Do I look like I’m in hospice?’” Ianni’s Medicare number had been stolen, and used by a company to fraudulently enroll her in hospice – specialized,...

How's this for a somber retirement forecast: The typical American worker has less than $1,000 saved for retirement, according to a new report from the National Institute on Retirement Security (NIRS). "The data are clear: Outside of high earners, Americans are choosing survival over savings and hoping to catch up later," NIRS executive director Dan Doonan told Yahoo Finance. "Even for those approaching retirement age — 55-to-64-year-olds — the median amount saved for retirement is only $30,000. We're looking at a looming crisis. These aren't just statistics — they represent millions of families who are doing everything right but still...

Two Pakistani nationals were indicted on Thursday for their roles in defrauding Medicare in a scheme conducted in Chicago, Illinois. The duo allegedly regularly billed “Medicare and private insurers” in excess of $10 million for “nonexistent healthcare services,” according to the Department of Justice. Kashif Iqbal and Burhan Mirza, and several other unnamed participants, “used nominee-owned laboratories and durable medical equipment providers to submit fraudulent claims to Medicare and private healthcare benefit programs for items and services not rendered. Mirza illegally obtained private identification information of individuals and providers as part of the fraud. He then used this data to...

Dr Oz, Administrator of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, exposed a linen factory was converted into an office building for 400 likely fake Medicaid businesses in Minneapolis He then confirmed EACH ONE IS BILLING ROUGHLY A MILLION DOLLARS to taxpayers “Roughly each business had $1,000,000 of billing. It's an industrial area” “How is it possible 400 businesses billing almost $400 million were able to thrive here? — Why did no one in the state figure out this was a concern?”

And I have very expensive Medicare Advantage PPO insurance. Where have all these people clamoring for medical services come from, and why has medical care literally been hijacked in the State of Florida? I couldn't even understand the woman at the specialist's office, her foreign accent was so thick. This appointment was on a referral from my PCP. Where is DeSantis on all of this? Is it the same in other states as well? Why are we allowing foreign hordes to debase the quality of medical care available to US citizens in their own country?

Minnesota wasn’t an accident and Maine proves it. From Medicaid fraud to no-bid contracts, whistleblowers are exposing the same playbook being used across multiple states.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt detailed the “four commonsense pillars” of President Donald Trump’s newly unveiled framework for the “Great Healthcare Plan,” which the White House is calling on Congress to pass.Leavitt outlined the president’s vision to reporters during Thursday’s White House press briefing. She stated that the first pillar is “permanently lowering prescription drug prices” by codifying Trump’s most-favored-nations deals with pharmaceutical companies.“Congress can get this done by codifying President Trump’s historic most-favored-nation [MFN] initiatives into law to guarantee Americans the same low prices for prescription drugs that people in other countries around the world pay,” Leavitt said.....

With evidence emerging of more than $9 billion worth of taxpayer fraud in Minnesota, the media are finally starting to cover the problem of criminals stealing from the taxpayer. But fraud is by no means limited to Minnesota—it is a nationwide problem that leaders at both the federal and state levels need to tackle before it gets even worse. Even the New York Times was forced to take notice, publishing an explosive article showing evidence of more than $1 billion of taxpayer money stolen by about 80 different Somali immigrants to Minnesota. Just days after the Minnesota story broke, a...

The Trump administration on Monday doled out billions to states from a fund Congress created to “transform” rural health care. The funds, however, will be lavished more generously on small states and states that adopt administration friendly policies. “The purpose of this $50 billion investment in rural health care is not to pay off the bills,” Dr. Mehmet Oz, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, told reporters Monday. “The purpose of this $50 billion investment is to allow us to rightsize the system and to deal with the fundamental hindrances of improvement in rural health care.” Over...

Over the past few years, Minnesota has become ground zero for what federal prosecutors now call “industrial-scale” fraud targeting taxpayer-funded social programs. What began as a single high-profile case exploiting COVID-era child nutrition funds has snowballed into revelations of potentially **$9 billion or more** stolen across multiple programs—mostly Medicaid-funded services. The schemes share common threads: shell entities, fake billing for services never provided, kickbacks, and luxury spending or transfers abroad. Here’s a clear, chronological breakdown of how it started, how it grew, and where things stand today. The Spark: Feeding Our Future and Aimee BockThe scandal traces its public origins...

We recently endured the longest-ever U.S. government shutdown as part of a fight over expiring healthcare tax credits. Democrats insist that Americans can’t afford Obamacare plans without the enhanced subsidies that were temporarily added post-COVID, which certainly raises questions about the efficacy of their Affordable Care Act. On top of proving a massive waste of time, the shutdown fight represented a misdirection of lawmaker energy. Rather than debating whether to paper over the healthcare affordability problem with yet another layer of subsidies, Congress instead should focus on finding cost-savings common ground like eliminating the abuse of the 340B drug discount...

When insurance costs more than survival, coverage is just a word. Obamacare didn’t protect families, it priced them into submission. A system that only works for the rich or the dependent is not a safety net. ====================================================================================== BRIEFING It’s been just over a decade since Obamacare was implemented, and for a majority of Americans, it’s done jack diddly squat for them. As a matter of fact, one American family sat down, did the Obamacare math honestly, and realized that working, paying premiums, and playing by the rules still left them staring at a literal dead end. Let’s break it down....

President Donald Trump has reopened the healthcare debate with a mix of ideas that do not align. He has pledged to “terminate” Obamacare, then signaled openness to extending ACA subsidies, then endorsed personal freedom accounts that would send money directly to individuals. These proposals represent very different diagnoses of what is wrong with American health care. No serious reform effort can point in contradictory directions. But this problem extends far beyond Trump. Republicans have offered inconsistent signals, with some now willing to extend ACA subsidies again despite a decade of arguing – correctly – that these subsidies inflate premiums and...

We’ve been here before: congressional Democrats and Republicans sparring over the future of the Affordable Care Act. But this time there’s an extra complication. Though it’s the middle of open enrollment, lawmakers are still debating whether to extend the subsidies that have given consumers extra help paying their health insurance premiums in recent years. The circumstances have led to deep consumer concerns about higher costs and fears of political fallout among some Republican lawmakers.