FBI Announces $15 Billion Healthcare Fraud
Stunning scope of crime, spanning 50 federal districts, is further evidence that American health care has lost its soul.
Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino just posted the following communique on X:
Update: Public corruption will not be tolerated as the Director and I vigorously pursue bad actors who violated their oaths to all of us. We view the theft of public funds the same way. It’s a crime against all of us. Today, in conjunction with the DOJ and our federal partners, we are announcing the results from the largest healthcare fraud investigation, as measured by financial losses, in DOJ history. The investigation spanned 50 federal districts, and resulted in nearly 3 billion dollars in false claims with over 15 million illegal distributions of pills. We seized 245 million dollars, we charged 324 defendants, 96 medical professionals, and the intended losses from these bad actors approached 15 billion dollars. Results matter. Talk is cheap. And this is not even the beginning of the beginning. If you’re stealing from the public, or violating your oath to serve, then we’re coming for you too. God bless America, and all those who defend Her.
The announcement reminded me of the 2019 book Code Blue: Inside America’s Medical Industrial Complex, by Mike Magee, an MD and former physician-spokesman for Pfizer. As he memorably described the corruption of the U.S. healthcare system.
Cozy relationships and generous gratuities have demonstrated a remarkable ability to corrupt even those we would instinctively put on the side of the angels, including members of the biomedical research community, deans of medical schools, directors of continuing medical education programs, officers at the NIH and FDA, and even seemingly altruistic patient advocacy organizations like the American Cancer Society.
A theologian looking at all this might conclude that American health care has lost its soul. A behavioral economist would point us toward studies showing that the exercise of moral judgment in a business context draws on a completely different cognitive framework from the one we use in making such decisions in our personal lives.
A $15 billion dollar fraud. This comes on the heels of a $2.75 billion federal fraud case in 2024, in which 193 people, including 76 doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals, were accused of illegally distributing millions of pills of the stimulant Adderall and of conducting fraudulent schemes involving $176 million of drug and alcohol abuse treatment services.
The industry is so thoroughly infested with money-grubbing hucksters, humbugs, and scumbags that it reminds me of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, which are so given to wickedness that God decides to annihilate them out of sheer disgust.
To be sure, as Plato pointed out in The Republic, fraud and injustice always proliferate in a Republic in which the citizens fail to tend properly and diligently to their affairs, including their health.
Plato argues that a proliferation of doctors and lawyers is a symptom of an unjust society. The presence of many doctors and lawyers suggests a society riddled with illness and disputes.
Not surprising. Thanks for reporting this, John. What is the road back from perdition? Are doctors corrupt or merely corruptible, and influenced by a corrupting system? I would propose that it is the system that corrupts doctors, not the other way around. Most doctors are kind, caring, and honest, but the few (and I hope it is just a few) who are susceptible, will succumb when the fruits of temptation are dangled before them systematically. We need a health care system which rewards doctors for providing good care, and offers them training which enables them to offer true healing to their patients, and not just "disease management" with dozens of pharmaceuticals. Speaking as one with an M.D., the practice of medicine can be quite discouraging when you lack the powers to effect true healing, and are stuck with prescribing poisons for your patients. At World Council for Health, Tess Lawrie's international consortium of forward-thinking health care reformers, we are trying to institute just such a system, founded on commitment to ethical principles, and healing integrative health care. The hope for better health care lies in such efforts. The best health care system is one that makes itself superfluous by building a society so healthy that it rarely needs health care.
What are the names of those charged? I am a physician, and when I think of the efforts I made for my patients and see what is going on in medical care these days, The good doctors have fled, or been kicked out. It began with LBJ and his vote-buying schemes of Medicare and Medicaid. Now millionaires come to see physicians complaining about ugly toenails, and wanting drugs they saw advertised on TV (which can damage the lives).They demand taxpayers pay for cosmetic stuff, and they get mad when you tell them Medicare does not pay for that. So, some doctors falsify the records so they can give the patients what they want and charge for it.
Sometimes I think I should never have become a physician. I did it because my mother died from TB after being terribly abused by the "US Public Health Service" because they assumed she was not taking medicine. She was, but she got it from an Army commissary, not from USPHS. I have had patients ask me, even in writing, to falsify their charts so that "insurance" would pay their bills for things not covered. I was also an ER doctor in St Louis. The patients, mostly young otherwise healthy males, made themselves sick with smoking, booze, drugs, violence and bad sex decisiions. Medicaid did not pay enough, and the hospital went broke and closed.
We have a pandemic of MORAL illness, not mental illness, in the USA. The government corrupted medical care. Medical care is not a proper function of government. Taxpayers dollars from gov't attracted the medical corporatists, and the main people who will put up with such a system are those who are either willing to sacrifice themselves for others, or those who are easily corrupted.
It is up to patients to fix this. There are not enough physicians to do it alone. 11 MILLION words of Obamacare regulations. 68 codes for "drowning and submersion while jumping or falling from burning watercraft" It includes water skis. How do water skis catch on fire? How does one jump off water skis?
TR MD