Last month, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. detailed six billion dollars worth of Medicare fraud, where scamming operations were caught “chasing money from our agencies.”
Some while willfully neglecting patients.
On Friday, he estimated that the HHS “loses $100,000,000,000 a year to theft.” This was from an interview on the Fly Zone Podcast, widely shared by conservatives on X.
“We shut down 800 hospices,” Kennedy explained. “You know what a hospice is? Where you’re going to die. Typically, if you go to a hospice, you leave within 18 days because your dying is terminal.” This is the context. Yet, when HHS investigated taxpayer-funded hospices in Los Angeles, “the people never died. Two or three years later they were there, and we’re paying $6,000 a month.”
The enormity is breath-taking: “We found a hotel room with 29 hospices in it. I mean a hotel, every room was a hospice, and none of them had any patients.” Some of the scams were more ambitious, involving bribery of patients and worse.
“Estonians and Armenians and people from Eastern Europe . . . were getting the patient numbers . . . stealing them from doctors’ offices.” And there were more scams, too, from members of other ethnic groups — remember Minnesota’s Somali fraudsters?
Tellingly, after closing down the operations, the HHS did not receive “a single call from a congressman or from a business owner saying, ‘Oh, you shut down my hospice and all these patients are on the street.’ None of them, because they were all crooked and they knew they were crooked.”
Folks on the left seem oddly silent. Have you heard any denunciations of, say, greed? Or is that vice only attributable to corporations and “the millionaires and billionaires”?
This should be a non-partisan issue.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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