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Dear Minnesotans,
At a federal courtroom in downtown St. Paul on Monday, Raymond Beckering appeared before the judge for the first time in the prosecution of Hassan Ahmed Hussein and Ahmed Abdirashid Mohamed for Medicaid fraud.
According to federal prosecutors, Hussein and Mohamed allegedly billed the state of Minnesota for as much as $750,000 in housing services for Medicaid patients that they never provided.
Most of the prosecutors who brought this case and related ones, including Joseph Thompson, resigned from the U.S. Department of Justice in the last month (Reportedly for anger at the Trump administration’s handling of Renee Good’s death at the hands of an ICE agent).
Related: Trump blasts ‘fraud’ in Minnesota in State of the Union address focused on the economy and immigration
So, the Trump administration brought in Beckering from the Justice Department’s Health Care Fraud Strike Force to pick up where the onetime Minnesota prosecutors left off. In investigating and prosecuting social services fraud in Minnesota, the Justice Department has a very important decision to make: How many more people like Beckering do they fly into Minneapolis?
What resources are worth investing in cases that may turn up millions of dollars of fraudulent activity in Medicaid?
That is the reality of the decisions shaping the Trump administration’s handling of social services fraud in Minnesota. During his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, you got the rhetoric, which, to editorialize, is unhelpful in understanding an already complex issue.
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Our president said that “members of the Somali community have pillaged an estimated $19 billion from the American taxpayer.”
Xenophobia aside, the $19 billion figure must have come from some different calculus concerning … who knows what because it bears absolutely no relation to the specific Medicaid and social services fraud problems engulfing Minnesota.
(A message left with the White House was not returned by Wednesday evening.)
Before showing himself the door, Thompson estimated that Minnesota social services fraud could reach $9 billion. But even that number was, frankly, wildly speculative. If all the cases brought forth by Thompson resulted in 100% successful prosecutions, or pleas where the victims admitted total wrongdoing, the grand total in money stolen from Medicaid would be $33 million.
Not $33 billion. Thirty-three million with an “M.”
The larger estimates, like the one from the conservative think tank Center of the American Experiment, includes the possibility that every single fraud allegation since Tim Walz became governor in 2019 will be proven as true (and includes past prosecutions such as the Feeding Our Future scandal).
The Center of the American Experiment gives a low-end estimate of $564 million in total fraud in the Walz administration and a $1.5 billion high-end estimate.
Thompson might counter that if he and his team had been given the time and prosecutorial independence they could eventually reach that $9 billion plateau in criminal charges. Again, that is the actual, realistic question the federal Justice Department must answer: How much work do we put into resuming what former prosecutors in Minnesota started?
Trump’s speech, which also included saying that Vice President JD Vance will take care of fraud and, in so doing, balance the budget (In the past fiscal year, the federal government ran a $1.8 trillion dollar deficit) provided little guidance about how his administration will tackle fraud in Minnesota going forward.
What questions do you have about fraud? Please email me at mblake@minnpost.com.
Sincerely,
Matthew Blake
