Healthcare fraud keeps fleecing taxpayers with the latest costing a full $1 billion

Just when you think you’ve seen the most shocking case of health-care fraud at taxpayer expense, another comes along to jolt you yet again.This time, it’s a massive Medicare scam run by an overseas mob — possibly linked to the Kremlin — that got away with $1 billion of federal money, a new federal indictment charges.The scheme, which began during the Biden administration, had low-level foreign nationals fly to America and purchase more than 30 medical-supply companies, feds say.They then used the stolen credentials of 7,000 physicians and more than 1 million Medicare recipients to submit a jaw-dropping $10.6 billion in fraudulent Medicare claims.The crooks wound up netting nearly $1 billion in hard cash, which they then allegedly laundered through China, Israel, Pakistan, Singapore and Turkey.Authorities nabbed some of the mob’s foot soldiers, but it’s not clear who actually ran the operation — and got the money.

Yet experts believe top officials in Russia must have been tied to it.How is it possible that bureaucrats sent out such massive sums with such apparently little scrutiny?Especially after Medicare recipients who saw the fraudulent billing — for catheters, for example, they never received — reported what they saw?And this comes on the heels of a report Saturday from Health Secretary Robert F.Kennedy Jr.

and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services boss Mehmet Oz that a 1 million Obamacare enrollees lack Social Security numbers, and yet none of the paper-pushers who police the program had said boo.The men slammed their predecessors for dismantling Obamacare “integrity guardrails, while partisan lawfare blocked common sense efforts to protect taxpayers.”As a result, they said, government has been paying people even though it has no idea “if they actually exist.”That so many of these “people” have been getting subsidies suggests this was no mere oversight, but rather part of Democrats’ strategy: Pretend fraud doesn’t exist...