Minnesota’s leftist governor, Tim Walz, got a stern warning from a Trump official on Friday regarding the potential loss of Medicaid funding unless he gets a handle on alleged fraud.
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz said in a social media post authorities in the state including Walz (D) needed to be investigated “because they’ve been asleep at the wheel,” Fox News reported Saturday.
“Based on what we know now, this is a clear dereliction of duty,” Oz wrote:
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.
Oz pointed out some of the allegedly stolen taxpayer money may have gone to the Somalian terrorist group Al-Shebab. Indeed, Breitbart News reported “The stolen billion in Medicaid and welfare money didn’t merely go into the pockets of corrupt Somalian migrants. They also went to fund terrorism in Africa.”
Oz said in order to “restore the integrity” of the program in the state, officials 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,” he added.
Meanwhile, the Minnesota Department of Health and Human Service Employees (DHS) claimed the group alerted Walz to the alleged fraud in the early stages, but said he retaliated against whistleblowers, per Breitbart News.
“Tim Walz is 100% responsible for massive fraud in Minnesota. We let Tim Walz know of fraud early on, hoping for a partnership in stopping fraud but no, we got the opposite response. Tim Walz systematically retaliated against whistleblowers using monitoring, threats, repression, and did his best to discredit fraud reports,” the group said.
President Donald Trump chose Oz to serve as the CMS Administrator after he won the presidency a second time, beating out former Vice President Kamala Harris (D) and Walz, who was her running mate.
Trump said at the time, “America is facing a Healthcare Crisis, and there may be no Physician more qualified and capable than Dr. Oz to Make America Healthy Again. He is an eminent Physician, Heart Surgeon, Inventor, and World-Class Communicator, who has been at the forefront of healthy living for decades.”
Read the full article here