In the wake of Minnesota’s massive fraud scheme busts, some states have started questioning what’s going on within their own borders. In Montana, Commissioner of Insurance and State Auditor James Brown’s curiosity spurred him to do some digging, and what he found made his jaw drop.
On this episode of “The Glenn Beck Program,” Glenn sits down with Brown to expose the massive Obamacare fraud scheme he recently uncovered in Montana.
“It’s bad,” Brown says of the scandal. “This is government at its worst. It’s human nature at its worst.”
Under Obamacare, members of federally recognized Native American tribes can sign up for Marketplace health insurance plans anytime (not just during open enrollment), often with little or no out-of-pocket costs.
“This scheme involved targeting at-risk Native Americans who live on reservations in Montana, fraudulently enrolling them on Obamacare, then physically transporting them across state lines, which is, as you know, human trafficking, and then billing our insurance company for rehab treatments that did not take place or were unnecessary or performed at greatly inflated costs,” Brown explains.
“And then what would happen is these Native Americans who were targeted then were just dumped out on the streets in Arizona and Southern California.”
“Why were they taken across state lines?” Glenn asks.
Brown explains that a lack of “proper oversight” in places like Los Angeles and Phoenix enabled fraudsters to exploit the Affordable Care Act’s strong protections for mental health and addiction treatment. Under those federal parity laws, insurers are required to cover rehab the same as regular medical care — even from out-of-state providers — allowing distant rehab facilities to rake in large sums of money from fake or inflated bills.
Glenn follows up with the obvious: How much money are we talking here?
“Fifty million with an M in fraud committed through this scheme,” says Brown, adding that the good news is this awareness has allowed his office to prevent another “23.3 million” from being stolen.
But money is only half the horror.
“There’s 200 Native Americans that have probably been victimized by this,” says Brown.
However because his jurisdiction is limited to the Montana border, and much of this fraud is taking place outside state lines, he is heavily reliant on the feds for prosecutions.
“Are they actively pursuing this?” Glenn asks.
“The Trump administration has been very helpful on the CMS side, which is the federal agency that administers Obamacare. They’ve been very active in working with us to make sure these fraudulent payments stop,” says Brown. “Not so much luck so far on the criminal prosecution side, but we are working on that.”
To hear more details about the massive fraud schemes uncovered in Montana, watch the full interview above.
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