Trump Showers Health Care Crooks With Love
As he flails about for a midterm message, President Trump has hit on a new role as a crusader against fraud. He laid out his position last month in an executive order establishing a task force to eliminate fraud, attacking Minnesota for the Feeding Our Future nonprofit that stole nearly $250 million in COVID relief funds (which was prosecuted during the Biden administration) and claiming without proof that “there is also strong reason to believe that similar problems exist in other States, including California, Illinois, New York, Maine, and Colorado.”
Among other priorities, the task force will “coordinate and accelerate a comprehensive national strategy to stop fraud, waste, and abuse within Federal benefits programs,” and “disrupt and dismantle fraud networks and facilitators.”
More from Whitney Curry Wimbish
There’s just one problem with this narrative. A new report published ahead of today’s House Ways and Means hearing on Medicare fraud shows that Trump appears to support medical fraud, as long as corporate executives and other elites are the ones committing it.
The analysis by Protect Our Care outlines how Trump has issued 15 pardons in his second term to business owners, pharmacists, doctors, and health care executives, who together defrauded more than $3 billion from the U.S. government and taxpayers, roughly 14 times the number at issue in the Minnesota Feeding Our Future case.
The actions include the April 2025 pardon of Paul Walczak, a Florida man who controlled a network of interconnected health care companies and was sentenced last year to 18 months in prison for employment tax crimes, including failing to pay $10 million in taxes.
The following month, Trump pardoned Lawrence Duran, the owner of mental health care company American Therapeutic Corporation, who in 2011 was sentenced to 50 years in prison for a $205 million Medicare fraud scheme, at the time the largest therapy-related Medicare scam of its kind.
Trump pardoned two convicted medical fraud criminals last November. Robert Harshbarger, a pharmacist married to U.S. Rep. Diana Harshbarger (R-TN), pleaded guilty in 2013 to committing $848,000 in health care fraud and to distributing misbranded kidney medications that had not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. And failed nursing home chain owner Joseph Schwartz stole $38 million in taxes and was sentenced to three years in prison.
The 15 total health care fraudsters whom Trump pardoned are just a fraction of the more than 70 political allies, executives, celebrities, and donors he has pardoned of criminal charges over his two terms.
“His war on fraud is a joke. He’s the most corrupt president in modern history,” Protect Our Care director of policy programs Vaishu Jawahar said in an interview. “He’s the ultimate narcissist. He’s handing people who remind him of himself a get-out-of-jail-free card.”
Protect Our Care’s analysis comes as the Ways and Means Committee listens this morning to a panel of three medical company executives, a consultant, and a doctor who is a Medicare fraud victim, as Republicans continue to stump for Trump’s pet project to punish blue states under the guise of protecting taxpayers from medical fraud.
Those talking points are a smokescreen for Trump’s real aim: justifying his destruction of the American health care system, Jawahar said. Trump cut $1 trillion from Medicare and Medicaid through his One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), which has already forced more than 800 hospitals, nursing homes, and other medical facilities to close entirely, cut services, or consider doing so, as the Prospect has reported.
The Medicaid cuts in OBBBA were premised on rooting out fraud, by forcing enrollees into onerous application and eligibility checks multiple times a year to keep their coverage. Though many of the cuts were designed to not take effect until after the midterm elections, some states, like Nebraska, have accelerated the timeline, with new “fraud prevention” procedures beginning May 1.
The GOP also ended the enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies that significantly increased insurance enrollment. The cuts mean that about 15 million Americans will lose health care coverage or become uninsured in the next eight years, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Already, ACA enrollment is down by 5 percent this year, a loss of well over one million patients.
Trump is seeking even more cuts in his 2027 budget proposal, including reducing the Department of Health and Human Services budget by $15.8 billion.
Protect Our Care notes that one of the biggest supporters for crushing the Affordable Care Act is himself a fraudster. Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) was the CEO of Columbia/HCA until 1997 and resigned shortly after federal agents raided his company, which was later found to have defrauded Medicare, Medicaid, and other health care programs through a variety of schemes, including cost report fraud and paying bribes to physicians. The company paid $1.7 billion, “by far the largest recovery ever reached by the government in a health care fraud investigation,” the Department of Justice said at the time.
Protect Our Care’s report points out that Scott “invoked the Fifth Amendment 75 times and walked away from the company with a severance package of over $300 million,” and that virtually all Medicaid fraud is committed by health care providers like Scott’s old company, rather than individual enrollees. If Republican lawmakers were serious about fraud, the organization continues, they wouldn’t fire independent inspectors general as they’ve done.
“While one in three Americans skip meals or other needs to afford health care and millions of working Americans lose sleep over their health care bills thanks to Trump’s cuts,” Protect Our Care wrote, “some of the biggest health care fraudsters in the nation are sleeping consequence-free in their multimillion-dollar mansions thanks to Trump’s pardons.”
The post Trump Showers Health Care Crooks With Love appeared first on The American Prospect.