Hi
@RobertKennedyJr I'm a cardiologist. I've spent twenty years watching Medicare deny my patients things they actually need — while stories like this one go on for years.
RFK Jr. says HHS loses $100 billion a year to theft. Then he described what they found in Los Angeles.
Criminals were walking into poor neighborhoods and offering people a $375 flat-screen TV for their patient number. "You don't ever have to go. We're just going to enroll you." Then they billed Medicaid roughly $6,000 a month — forever.
A hospice is where you go to die. The average stay is measured in days to weeks. They found people enrolled two and three years later. Still alive. Still billing. Of course they never died — they were never sick.
They found a hotel where every single room was a registered hospice. Twenty-nine of them. Zero patients. Just addresses.
They shut down 800 hospices. And here's the detail that tells you everything: not one congressman called. Not one owner complained that patients were on the street. Nobody protested, because they all knew exactly what they were running.
Now let me tell you what this looks like from inside a practice.
I fight for prior authorizations on medications that prevent heart attacks. I get denied for imaging that finds disease early. I have patients rationing insulin. Every dollar in that hotel room was a dollar that didn't go to a nurse, a scan, or a drug that keeps someone alive.
Fraud isn't a budget line. It's care stolen from patients who needed it.
Two things I'd say if I ever got the room:
Use AI to find the outliers. This is not hard. Every claim is already digital. Flag every provider billing five or ten standard deviations above their peers for a service, then audit them. A pattern like 29 hospices at one address, or a "terminal" patient billing for 36 straight months, is something an algorithm catches in an afternoon. We are using AI to read ECGs better than cardiologists — we can absolutely use it to catch a hotel room billing Medicaid.
Then talk to practicing doctors. Not consultants. Not administrators. Physicians running busy clinics, who know exactly which codes get abused and which patterns are impossible, because we live inside the billing system every day. We could point at it in an hour. Almost nobody asks us.
Catching fraud isn't about cutting care. It's the only way to fund it.
Every stolen dollar has a patient's name on it. We just never learn which one.