FBI Announces $15 Billion Healthcare Fraud

Stunning scope of crime, spanning 50 federal districts, is further evidence that American health care has lost its soul.

Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino just posted the following communique on X:

Update: Public corruption will not be tolerated as the Director and I vigorously pursue bad actors who violated their oaths to all of us. We view the theft of public funds the same way. It’s a crime against all of us. Today, in conjunction with the DOJ and our federal partners, we are announcing the results from the largest healthcare fraud investigation, as measured by financial losses, in DOJ history. The investigation spanned 50 federal districts, and resulted in nearly 3 billion dollars in false claims with over 15 million illegal distributions of pills. We seized 245 million dollars, we charged 324 defendants, 96 medical professionals, and the intended losses from these bad actors approached 15 billion dollars. Results matter. Talk is cheap. And this is not even the beginning of the beginning. If you’re stealing from the public, or violating your oath to serve, then we’re coming for you too. God bless America, and all those who defend Her.

The announcement reminded me of the 2019 book Code Blue: Inside America’s Medical Industrial Complex, by Mike Magee, an MD and former physician-spokesman for Pfizer. As he memorably described the corruption of the U.S. healthcare system.

Cozy relationships and generous gratuities have demonstrated a remarkable ability to corrupt even those we would instinctively put on the side of the angels, including members of the biomedical research community, deans of medical schools, directors of continuing medical education programs, officers at the NIH and FDA, and even seemingly altruistic patient advocacy organizations like the American Cancer Society.

A theologian looking at all this might conclude that American health care has lost its soul. A behavioral economist would point us toward studies showing that the exercise of moral judgment in a business context draws on a completely different cognitive framework from the one we use in making such decisions in our personal lives.

A $15 billion dollar fraud. This comes on the heels of a $2.75 billion federal fraud case in 2024, in which 193 people, including 76 doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals, were accused of illegally distributing millions of pills of the stimulant Adderall and of conducting fraudulent schemes involving $176 million of drug and alcohol abuse treatment services.

The industry is so thoroughly infested with money-grubbing hucksters, humbugs, and scumbags that it reminds me of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, which are so given to wickedness that God decides to annihilate them out of sheer disgust.

To be sure, as Plato pointed out in The Republic, fraud and injustice always proliferate in a Republic in which the citizens fail to tend properly and diligently to their affairs, including their health.

Plato argues that a proliferation of doctors and lawyers is a symptom of an unjust society. The presence of many doctors and lawyers suggests a society riddled with illness and disputes.