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fraud
If Trump Really Cared About Fraud in Minnesota, Critics Say, He Would Go After UnitedHealth
"Most of the perpetrators are lodged within large corporations run by white executives with excellent and expensive legal representation," wrote one journalist.
Jan 28, 2026
US President Donald Trump has used unsubstantiated allegations of large-scale fraud in Minnesota's Somali community as a pretext to surge federal agents into the state—with deadly consequences—and cut off federal childcare funding.
But unlike the Somali community, which Trump has subjected to grotesque attacks that have left many fearing for their safety, Minnesota-based UnitedHealth Group (UHG) has not faced the president's public ire.
One of the nation's largest for-profit health insurance companies, UHG is the leading beneficiary of a long-running Medicare Advantage fraud scheme that could cost US taxpayers $1.2 trillion over the next decade—a sum that dwarfs even the White House's wildest claims about the costs of fraud allegedly committed by Somali-run daycares.
The $1.2 trillion estimate comes from a report published earlier this month by the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC), which found that federal overpayments to privately run, publicly funded Medicare Advantage plans will total around $76 billion this year in part due to a practice known as upcoding, whereby insurers present patients as sicker than they actually are to reap larger payments.
UnitedHealthcare, UHG's insurance division, is the leading Medicare Advantage provider in the United States. Stephen Hemsley, UnitedHealth Group's CEO, received a base salary of $1 million last year and a one-time equity award worth $60 million.
ICE/CBP swarms into Minnesota to crack down on government fraud. Somehow they sidestep the orders-of-magnitude higher government fraud by Minnesota-based UnitedHealth, who leads a Medicare Advantage fraud that government analyst MedPac estimates as costing America $76 billion/yr pic.twitter.com/dECnwgUCRV
— David Dayen (@ddayen) January 27, 2026
A Senate report released on January 12 found that UnitedHealth Group uses "aggressive strategies" to maximize patients' so-called "risk-adjustment scores" in an effort to receive larger Medicare Advantage payments from the federal government.
"UHG has turned risk adjustment into a major profit-centered strategy, which was not the original intent of the program," states the report, which was based on more than 50,000 pages of company documents obtained by the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The Senate report cited a 2024 Wall Street Journal investigation showing that "insurer-driven diagnoses by UnitedHealth for diseases that no doctor treated generated $8.7 billion in 2021 payments to the company... UnitedHealth’s net income that year was about $17 billion."
"A real crackdown on fraud would go after those big fish first."
While the US Justice Department—headed by former corporate lobbyist Pam Bondi—is currently investigating UnitedHealth Group over its Medicare billing practices, the Trump administration has enabled the conglomerate's continued expansion and abuses.
Last August, the DOJ settled a Biden-era legal challenge aimed at preventing UnitedHealth Group from absorbing yet another competitor. According to a tracker run by the American Economic Liberties Project, the corporation is still denying necessary care to patients, overbilling the federal government, and engaging in anticompetitive behavior on the Trump administration's watch.
Journalist Merrill Goozner wrote last week that "there is no doubt greedy operators ripped off Minnesota safety net programs," observing that "several of the nearly 100 people under investigation have already pleaded guilty."
"But if federal officials in Minnesota really want to go after industrial-scale fraud, they ought to step up their slow-motion investigation of UnitedHealth Group," Goozner wrote. "The nation’s tattered social safety net, under assault by the Trump administration and shrinking daily, remains prone to abuse by unscrupulous operators. Medicare and Medicaid are especially juicy targets. Most of the perpetrators are lodged within large corporations run by white executives with excellent and expensive legal representation."
"A real crackdown on fraud," he added, "would go after those big fish first."
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Walz Says Trump Is Exploiting Minnesota Fraud Issue to Defund State’s Childcare Programs
"He’s politicizing the issue to defund programs that help Minnesotans," said the Democratic governor.
Dec 31, 2025
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on Tuesday accused US President Donald Trump and his administration of sensationalizing and exploiting a real problem—fraud in the state's social services system—to advance their broader agenda of gutting the safety net.
"This is Trump’s long game," Walz wrote on social media after the US Department of Health and Human Services announced it was suspending all federal childcare funds to Minnesota, alleging "blatant fraud that appears to be rampant."
Walz added that fraud is "a serious issue—but this has been [Trump's] plan all along."
"He’s politicizing the issue to defund programs that help Minnesotans," the governor wrote.
This is Trump’s long game.
We’ve spent years cracking down on fraudsters. It’s a serious issue - but this has been his plan all along.
He’s politicizing the issue to defund programs that help Minnesotans. https://t.co/7ByWjeXxu0
— Governor Tim Walz (@GovTimWalz) December 31, 2025
The right-wing media ecosystem and Republican politicians have fixated on fraud in Minnesota in recent weeks, using it to launch bigoted attacks on the state's Somali community and call for mass deportations of Somalis.
The issue exploded over the weekend after Nick Shirley, a right-wing influencer and YouTuber, released a video claiming to expose fraud in Minnesota day care centers. The video went viral and was shared by top Trump administration officials, including FBI Director Kash Patel and Vice President JD Vance. Kristi Noem, head of the US Department of Homeland Security, said in the wake of the video's publication that federal agents "are on the ground" in the state and "conducting a massive investigation."
Minnesota Public Radio reported that the state's House speaker, Rep. Lisa Demuth (R-13A), confirmed that her caucus directed Shirley to the day care sites that he visited.
"Those featured in his widely viewed video have been part of a state-administered childcare program using federal money, although some recently had operations or payments suspended," the outlet noted.
The Guardian noted that "despite claims by conservatives on social media that the allegations of fraud were ignored until now, there have been years of fraud investigations that began with the indictments in 2022 of 47 defendants for their alleged roles in a $250 million scheme that exploited a federally funded child nutrition program during the Covid-19 pandemic."
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Beware Rick Scott's Brave New Healthcare Fix
The hospital CEO turned US senator is a fraud superstar at working the system.
Dec 08, 2025
When Rick Scott came to town, every one of us who worked at Columbia Hospital Corporation’s Victoria Hospital in Miami, Florida stood at attention. The young, dashing CEO had come to make sure staff bloat was reduced and profits were maximized. After leaving my position in Denver and moving my whole family to Florida just five months prior to being the hospital’s billing manager, I was just learning how to do my job within all the rules and regulations. And Rick Scott in our facility meant I needed to at least be pleasant to the big boss. And, indeed, I was.
As the day of Scott’s visit wore on, staff members who were about to be laid off just six weeks before the holiday season in 1989 were called to the admin offices via the hospital’s public announcement system. The extension named “3200” was the call to ride the elevator up several floors to be dismissed by the hospital CEO and his CFO. The day never left my memory as one during which good, kind, and dedicated colleagues, including the boss who brought me to the position, were riffed. On her way out the door, she reminded me to stay alert and be careful. I didn’t know what to do. I cried a lot that night at home, yet I didn’t know what was still to come in Scott’s new vision of profitability.
Within weeks, I noticed a change in our workflow. I was pushed hard to generate collection letters for all the Medicare patients who had been admitted to Columbia’s Victoria Hospital who had not paid their Medicare deductibles before discharge. But then I was instructed to put those generated collection letters in the patient files but never to mail them to the patients. That, I was told, would create a paper trail for due diligence in collection efforts as required before the hospital could submit to have those unpaid (and now unbilled) deductibles reimbursed by the federal Medicare program.
Filing letters in patient files without sending them out seemed wrong and it seemed fraudulent to me, and since I was new to it all I thought maybe if this was standard practice for the hospital, it could have been some loophole I didn’t know about. I dove into the Medicare rules, and I found this troubling line, “If you knew or should have known,” a certain action was fraud, you are complicit and could be charged with a crime. When I questioned the CFO about it, he snapped at me and said that if I wouldn’t do my job, I might need to rethink working there.
Universal coverage via improved and expanded Medicare for all of us would end Rick Scott’s grift.
In mid-December 1989, with my husband suffering heart problems and desperately in need of insurance coverage, I loaded all my personal items in a box and left the hospital. I quit my job. I wrote a letter to my former US Sen. Tim Wirth of Colorado about the situation, and I never heard directly back about what happened to that letter as I asked him to be cautious about disclosing my name or location. I was already terrified of these people. They collected hundreds of thousands of dollars quarterly from the scheme I was asked to be part of, and Rick Scott’s Columbia Hospital Corporation was building a portfolio that included an awful lot of hospitals. Scott was a rising star, after all, and making the first few hospitals he owned profitable was critical to keep that star on its trajectory.
After the Department of Justice started investigating Columbia’s hospitals in the mid to late 1990s, the hospital industry giant paid a record $1.7 billion settlement around defrauding the US government programs, Medicare, Medicaid, and TriCare. It turns out the schemes to enrich profits were widespread and involved much more than patient collection letters. Yet, even after Rick Scott was forced to resign and take responsibility for the fraud committed, he took a severance package of $10 million and stock options totaling nearly $300 million. Wow, that was a generous, golden, gilded, and glorious send off, eh? Up next for Scott?
To see this man ascend the political ranks to be thought of as an appropriate US Senate architect of a new health industry scheme to replace the Affordable Care Act-Obamacare subsidies is a tragic turn of events. We will not get anything close to a humane system under a Rick Scott plan.
The health industry is likely celebrating a return to laissez-faire, anything-goes-if-it’s-profitable model Rick Scott was an expert at designing and operating for Columbia Hospital Corporation. Patients will be the revenue stream upon which his fortune grows larger, and until we wake up and finally move to a model that puts patient health and well-being at the forefront of the design, we will see the health industry enrich itself beyond its wildest dreams while the architect of Medicare and Medicaid fraud, Sen. Rick Scott, takes yet another victory lap on taxpayer money. He and his health industry allies really love being on the dole, despite any claims to the contrary. They just call it profit.
Universal coverage via improved and expanded Medicare for all of us would end Rick Scott’s grift. Perhaps now the truth becomes even more clear. Ending the stranglehold of hospital corporations like the behemoth HCA Healthcare that also includes all of the hospitals previously owned by Columbia Hospital Corporation. On the corporate website, HCA Healthcare writes, “HCA Healthcare, Inc. owns and operates 186 hospitals and approximately 2,400 ambulatory sites of care, including surgery centers, free standing emergency rooms, urgent care centers, and physician clinics in 20 states and the United Kingdom.”
The profits are dear—not the patients, my friends.
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