excalibur
Diamond Member
- Mar 19, 2015
- 28,540
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Thank you, Elon and DOGE.
This was just another money-laundering scheme.
The waste in government is enormous, because of these scams alone.
Elon Musk's DOGE Uncovered the Biggest Health Care Heist in American History
This was just another money-laundering scheme.
The waste in government is enormous, because of these scams alone.
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.
Why did transnational organizations go after these particular programs? "Criminals go where the money is," Acting Health and Human Services Inspector General,Juliet Hodgkins said at a news conference about "the largest health care fraud takedown in American history." There's more than $1.4 trillion spent by these government programs per year, and the bad guys have tried, by hook or by crook, and even with the aid of AI, to set into motion plans to steal nearly $15 billion. They got away with just shy of $3 billion before they were caught, and their other frauds were frozen in their tracks.
If this bust looks to you like it had Elon Musk's old Department of Government Efficiency fingerprints on it, you'd be right. Using AI and law enforcement tactics, the DOGE team worked with HHS, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid, and an all-hands-on-deck array of federal agents from the DEA, FBI, and health care agencies to track down all fraud leads, according to Dr. Mehmet Oz, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). As a result, the feds are setting up a healthcare data fusion center to detect where fraud spikes are occurring in near real time.
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Oz said these bad guys were sophisticated and used state-of-the-art methods to rip the government programs blind.
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.
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Elon Musk's DOGE Uncovered the Biggest Health Care Heist in American History
