Thursday is Exposing Fraud in Minnesota Day

If it's Thursday in Minnesota, it's Exposing Fraud in Minnesota Day. It's Thursday so the DOJ, CMS, Assistant U.S. Attorney Collin McDonald, U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen and a cast of dozens were on hand by 11:45 am CDT for a scheduled 11:00 am CDT news conference. It was worth the wait as it was one of the most substantive news conferences I've ever watched. First off, McDonald announced 15 new Minnesota Medicaid fraud cases totalling an additional $90,000,000 in fraud. Further, McDonald said that the nationwide task force would aggressively investigate potential fraudsters in the weeks and months ahead. If Tim Walz, Ilhan Omar and Keith Ellison aren't drinking Maalox by the jug, they should be.

Quoting Attorney McDonald, This Alpha News article opens by saying "This is not the end of our work in Minnesota, this is not the end of the beginning of our work in Minnesota, this is the beginning of our work in Minnesota." This isn't shaping up to be a traditional investigation. This team of investigators sound like they're intent on prosecuting each lawbreaker, whether they're high-profil or whether they're nobodies, with the theory being that investigating the nobodies might get them to flip and give them information to prosecute the big fish.

Here's the videotaped news conference:

Acknowledged as being in today's audience was Nick Shirley, the YouTube reporter whose 42-minute video turned this into a national story. Fox9 quoted RFK Jr. as saying this:

"This was the cost of the early intervention development program in 2020. It was $38.1 million. This is what we expected to be paying every year," explained Sec. Kennedy. "Instead, this year it hit $442 million. ... [That's] the magnitude of the fraud and the damage that we're talking about today."

While the total amount of fraud isn't known, McDonald said $9,000,000,000 is likely too low of an estimate. Just when the DFL thinks that this scandal is behind them, a new round of indictments appears. The DFL's biggest problems are policy-based and character-based.

A little under 26 minutes into the video, Collin McDonald said "The common theme throughout these cases is fraudsters exploiting vulnerable programmms and vulnerable people to enrich themselves no matter the consequences to the programs or the people." Ladies and gentlemen, that's the personification of evil. It's that simple.

It's important to remember that these are mostly Medicaid programs created by the federal government. You can debate whether we can afford this exhaustive of a safety net. That's a legitimate debate. What isn't a legitimate debate is whether these programs have legitimate constituent groups. Further, we can debate whether this is the right delivery system of these services.

If the day of the week ends with the letter Y, there's a decent possibility of it being a day when Medicaid fraud will be exposed in Minnesota. While that seems like a smart-arse comment, it's actually accurate. Since the DFL ignored the problem until it grew into a crisis, it's best left to Republicans and independents to fix this.