Is Cultural Fraud Now Worse Than Covid?

Letter to Ephesians: While Medicaid & Medicare fraudsters are dominating the headlines, corporate America & NFPs alike are getting fleeced almost as bad as Uncle Sam. Case in point is the Autism Therapy Business that’s booming along with billing abuse…

The revealing WSJ article is focused on how even “insurers [are now] warning of fraud & exorbitant charges from so-called healthcare providers, including one that stuck a parent with a surprise $911,400 bill.” The obvious takeaway is that it’s not just Somali immigrants & California’s Sanctuary Schemers who are gaming the healthcare industry to the tune of billions of taxpayers’ dollars, but bad actors withing the companies & NFPs themselves. The corollary message is that genuinely needy folks as well as taxpayers are increasingly stuck paying the tab, one way or another. Noted the paper: “The autism-therapy industry, once a tiny corner of pediatric care, has exploded into a multi-billion-dollar business, fueled by rising diagnoses, new providers entering the market & laws requiring insurers to cover more services … It has also attracted predatory providers who bill for phantom services, pad hours & charge steep fees for care delivered by low-wage workers with minimal training.”

Of course, whistle-blowers, industry watchers & pundits have been warning everyone for years now about the Great Con & especially after the pandemic debacle & near societal breakdown. While an increasing number of rotten actors have finally been indicted and/or shutdown through increased enforcement of the laws, the bigger problem has too often been that the laws themselves mandate little or no oversight … and even when common sense begs for such oversight, too many lawmakers & administrators have looked the other way. The resulting license to take “other peoples’ money” seems to be a disease worse than Covid.

Davd Soul