Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. accused his predecessor Xavier Becerra of gutting a team responsible for policing fraud across trillions of dollars.
“My predecessor, Xavier Becerra, when he came into my agency, there were only 80 people in program integrity, 80 people,” Kennedy said. “This is for 50 states and five territories.”
Becerra allegedly stripped nearly the entire team tasked with guarding $2.2 trillion in annual HHS payments against fraud, said Kennedy during a White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud press conference.
Kennedy said those employees were responsible for monitoring roughly four million transactions each day. He claimed Becerra then reassigned 76 members of the team.
So that when I came in, there’s only six people who are in charge of all program integrity for my department. And it was an invitation for the fraudsters to come in and steal everything. And that’s why we have this hospice program.
We’ve closed thousands of hospices here in Los Angeles because they didn’t have patients. They were just billing us $6,000 a month for phony accounts. And the durable medical equipment fraud, tens of billions of dollars here in Los Angeles County.
Autism services, tens of billions of dollars all stolen because nobody was minding the store. Xavier Becerra came in and he instituted a program called Pay and Chase. What that means is when we get an invoice from a hospice, that we know is fraudulent.
Kennedy’s allegations quickly raised questions about fraud and oversight at HHS during the Biden administration.
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