Federal law enforcement has made another massive hospice fraud bust in LA, swooping on an alleged $27 million scam.
That’s a lot of money for a problem that Gavin Newsom claimed was a racist myth.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blache deployed a team of investigators and prosecutors who uncovered a massive plot to steal the identities of people who had already died. One co-conspirator allegedly paid accomplices for the information he needed to steal patients’ identities, then used the money to fund a high-end lifestyle, including a Rolls-Royce.
LA’s own Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. noted that federal authorities had busted more than 800 hospices for fraud in LA alone since the start of the crackdown.
The MAHA leader noted the miraculous fact that patients at some of these hospices appeared to be immortal: they never died, enabling fraudsters to collect government payments on their behalf forever (or at least until they were caught).
It is the most vulnerable, and the most desperate, who suffer from these crimes. Money that is diverted by scam artists is unavailable for the needs of actual hospice patients.
Then politicians demand more money, leading to higher taxes — and the cycle repeats.
California politicians played the race card when the feds started raising questions about hospice fraud in LA.
Then they tried claiming that the Trump administration’s claims of fraud were “baseless.”
When that didn’t work, California politicians started to claim that they were doing everything they could.
“We want Californians to know that we are on it,” said California Attorney General Rob Bonta.
But that is hard to believe, given how much the feds keep finding.
The problem begins with the sheer scale of health care spending in California, from both state and federal sources.
There is so much money that fraudsters find trying their luck irresistible.
Add to that the fact that there is so little oversight, and the scams start to proliferate.
Then add the fact that California expanded Medi-Cal to cover illegal aliens, however briefly, before Newsom was forced to limit new enrollments because of the sheer cost.
Once you condone any kind of illegality into a system that big, there are bound to be other forms of lawbreaking.
Only the federal government seems to be able to spearhead the fight against fraud.
And only when led by a president determined to do something about it.