Powerline's Scott Johnson has been singing the praises of Assistant United States Attorney Joe Thompson as the only public servant in Minnesota who has cared enough about taxpayer money to doggedly pursue the Somali fraud schemes and bring some of the criminals to justice.
He's not done yet.
"Minnesota has become a magnet for fraud, so much so that we have developed a fraud tourism industry — people coming to our state purely to exploit and defraud its programs," said Thompson. He brought new indictments against two Philadelphia men who heard through the criminal grapevine about how easy it was to scam the Minnesota Medicaid department. They traveled to Minneapolis, completed the necessary paperwork, and then returned to Philadelphia, where they proceeded to bill taxpayers for $3.5 million.
"The men submitted up to $3.5 million in 'fake and inflated bills' for Medicaid reimbursements after they set up a company intended to provide housing and other services to individuals who qualified for the program," reports CBS News.
It should be noted that the two men, Anthony Waddell Jefferson and Lester Brown, are not Somalians. Not that it matters. There are plenty of other people, in and out of state, who joined the fraud party and robbed Minnesotans and the American taxpayer of up to $9 billion, according to Thompson.
"Providers in 14 'high-risk,' state-run Medicaid programs being audited by the state have billed $18 billion since 2018, and 'half or more' is possibly fraudulent," Thompson said.
“The fraud is not small. It isn’t isolated. The magnitude cannot be overstated,” Thompson said. “What we see in Minnesota is not a handful of bad actors committing crimes. It’s a staggering, industrial-scale fraud. It’s swamping Minnesota and calling into question everything we know about our state.”
Only 36% of the funds for these programs come from Minnesota. Two-thirds is federal money, stolen from U.S. taxpayers.
What's been uncovered so far is apparently only the tip of the iceberg.
Federal agents raided the Bloomington office of another provider, Ultimate Home Health Services, Thursday morning, executing a search warrant that is the first indication of a federal investigation into Integrated Community Supports, another state-run Medicaid program.
Integrated Community Supports started in 2021 and is designed to help disabled adults live more independently in apartments rather than in an institution. The program is vulnerable to fraud and has seen soaring cost increases since it began, paying out $170 million in 2024 compared to $4.6 million in 2021, according to the search warrant filed by the feds.
The ongoing federal investigation found that, instead of providing services, many Integrated Community Supports providers simply rented apartments to Medicaid recipients and billed the program for services they didn’t provide, Thompson said. The program allows providers to bill hundreds of dollars a day, often adding up to $100,000 to $200,000 a year, per client, he said.
The fraudulent billings to Medicaid are nothing new. What's different is that there was so much cash sloshing around as a result of the "Pandemic Relief" programs and inadequate or non-existent safeguards against fraud, which allowed criminals to assume they could steal as much as possible with little chance of being caught.
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Estimates of total Medicaid fraud are hard to come by. Individual agencies have their own figures, and it's hard to differentiate between "improper payments," which may or may not be fraudulent, and illegal payments to criminals. It's a $900 billion program, and if just 10% was stolen (a reasonable guess), that's $90 billion of taxpayer dollars that made it into the pockets of criminals.
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