re: FBI Busts 2 Billion Dollar Fraud Scheme in California

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There's been a whole shite ton of nothing happening lately.

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You sure about that?

The chart below is kind of strange. The federal Medicare fraud taskforce (not sure what the official name for it is) was created in 2007, I believe.

You can see it did a moderate amount of policing until 2014, then it exploded.

I'm guessing that was because it coincided with Obamacare being fully rolled out. One feature of Obamacare was to cap the percentage of profits that insurance companies could make, which essentially caused them to expand the whole operation (which was the plan all along). They just paid out more and took in more to expand the whole pie so that their capped piece of it would be bigger.

More services being billed, more opportunity for fraud. It all tracks.

Continued to climb the first couple of years under Trump but then...the taskforce went a whole year in 2019 without a single raid. And that was under Trump.

Remember, COVID didn't surface as something that was shutting anything down until early 2020. Late 2019 it was identified, but there was no panic about it yet. So I can't explain that complete lack of activity in 2019 under Trump.

Then 2020, COVID panic, shut down clinics, no elective surgeries, makes sense that it would fall and gradually resume, which is exactly what you see...started climbing again during the last two years of Biden and continued on roughly the same upward trajectory under Trump.

There's really nothing about it that indicates that Trump is doing anything more than anybody else has done about Medicare fraud. And at least one year, he did considerably less.

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This is what I voted for.

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The data suggests that you could have voted for anyone and it would look similar.