"Nick Shirley, the young man who has been putting “professional” journalists to shame with his on-site reporting on rampant Medicaid fraud, released another video exposing schemes in New York, these involving senior centers for elderly Koreans and Chinese.
"One that he visited, an adult day care in Flushing, claims to have nearly 8,000 members, for which it bills Medicaid $1,600 each. But even an employee admits that the number is wildly inflated. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz joined Shirley.
“We uncovered over $190,000,000 in fraud,” Shirley says, “through adult and personal home care scams in NYC. Your tax dollars are paying for elderly Koreans and Chinese to play ping pong and do tai chi, while the fraudsters give $ kickbacks to those who enroll.”
The mainstream media has pooh-poohed Shirley’s work (no doubt while lounging at their desks), but he continues to show them up with the kind of shoe-leather, public-service reporting that journalists used to do.
While Shirley’s work is important, he’s looking at only part of the problem. There is no question that outright fraud against federal entitlement programs is rampant. And we hope the fraudsters face swift and sure judgment and that laws are changed to stop fraud at the source. (See “The Fraud Industry Is Thriving, And Guess Who’s Happy About It.”)
But not all government fraud is illegal. In fact, we’d say that legal fraud is an even bigger scam than what Shirley is uncovering.
This fraud involves lawmakers opening the spending floodgates for projects that line the pockets of unions and politically connected businesses, while doing nothing to improve the lives of the taxpayers who foot the bill. And this is a decidedly bipartisan scam. And it needs just as much attention as the schemes Shirley is documenting.
For example, Bess Byers, a digital marketing specialist at Reason magazine, took viewers to a slab of sidewalk that taxpayers spent just under $1 million to repave — in the name of climate change." . . .
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