Corporations, Not Immigrants, Are Responsible for Vast Majority of Healthcare Fraud, OIG Report Shows

Summary

For more than a year, the Trump administration has sought to blame immigrants for widespread health care fraud. Immigrant communities, the Trump administration’s bunk theory goes, are draining resources and raising costs by defrauding the federal government. The spurious allegations played a key role in Donald Trump’s massive — and deadly — immigration crackdown in Minnesota over the winter. A semiannual report from the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General to Congress, however, highlights a different narrative. The report, which covers enforcement actions over a six-month period, highlights the obvious: Corporations — not small immigrant-oriented healthcare providers, or undocumented immigrants illegally taking benefits — are responsible for the vast majority of alleged fraud in the American health care system. Experts on immigrant rights and healthcare say the administration is using immigrants as a scapegoat for systemic fraud in the healthcare system that can be attributed to corporate greed, while shielding actual bad actors who profit from a broken system. “There isn’t really clear evidence of any systemic issues implicating immigrants,” said Sarah Krieger, senior policy counsel at the National Immigration Law Center. “The administration’s public messaging is focusing on immigrants and immigrant workers, but that’s constructing a narrative with the intent of hurting immigrants, not with actually rooting out any problems.” Krieger pointed to examples of the Trump administration using clemency and pardons to get corporate healthcare fraudsters off the hook. At the event, Vance erroneously warned that “there could be tens of billions of fraudulent payments in the California system” going toward “illegal aliens, going to fraudulent businesses.” Oz — best known for promoting diet pills — similarly claimed that hundreds of millions of dollars of “questionable expenditures” were linked to “immigration-related costs,” and that “folks who are undocumented” were fraudulently getting access to Medicaid funds in California. By signing up, I agree to receive emails from The Intercept and to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use . The administration does not want to highlight that type of fraud in their public rhetoric because they’re enabling it, said Krieger, of the National Immigration Law Center. “They’re not actually interested in solving the problem.” “The administration has cut funding for all sorts of internal enforcement mechanisms. The Department of Government Efficiency has stripped Congress of its power of the purse.