Columbia Gamecock

You’ve probably heard the news by now: Minnesota fraudsters stole over $1 billion from Medicaid. And you deserve an explanation. Our staff at CMS told me they’ve never seen anything like this in Medicaid — and everyone from Gov. Tim Walz on down needs to be investigated, because they’ve been asleep at the wheel. Based on what we know now, this is a clear dereliction of duty. First, the facts: In recent years, Minnesota Medicaid launched several new programs, including Housing Stabilization Services, which helped disabled homeless individuals, and Early Intensive Developmental and Behavioral Intervention, which reimbursed therapy costs for families with autistic children. Some bad actors in Minnesota’s Somali community decided to game the system. And when they got away with it, they decided to go bigger. The housing program was supposed to cost $2.6 million dollars annually. Last year, it paid out over $100 million. The autism program ballooned from $3 million in 2018 to nearly $400 million in 2023. These scammers used stolen taxpayer money to buy flashy cars, purchase overseas real estate, and offer kickbacks to parents who enrolled their kids at fake autism treatment centers. Some of it may have even made its way to the Somalian terrorist group Al-Shebab. So why didn’t Walz stop them? That’s simple: because he went all-in on identity politics. Somalis are a huge voting bloc, and the state’s leaders were afraid that “forcefully tackling this issue might cause political backlash.” That’s not me saying that. It’s a Somali-American fraud investigator who talked to The New York Times. Somali scammers get rich off the programs Gov. Walz was supposed to be managing. Minnesota politicians get elected with Somali votes and keep the money flowing. This isn’t just fraud: it’s political patronage at public expense. When Minnesota told CMS about the problem last year, they assured us they’d handle it. By summer, it was obvious they couldn’t — or wouldn’t. So, we stepped in and shut down the worst program: housing. We also froze provider enrollment in a few of the most abused programs. So where do we go from here? To restore the integrity of the Medicaid program, Minnesota must: 1. Provide CMS with weekly updates on how the state is stopping fraud. 2. Freeze enrollment of all high-risk providers for 6 months. 3. Confirm all providers in place are legitimate or remove them. 4. Send CMS a corrective action plan of how these will prevent this from happening again. If we’re unsatisfied with the state’s plans or cooperation, we’ll stop paying the federal share of these programs. The message to Walz is clear: either fix this in 60 days or start looking under your couch for spare change, because we’re done footing the bill for your incompetence. With CMS on the case, these scammers and their bureaucratic enablers have nowhere left to hide. The vulnerable Americans who depend on these programs — and the taxpayers who fund them — deserve the truth.