Pride, Patriotism & Protecting Seniors

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
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**Doug Pike** (0:52)
All right, here we go with yet another edition of Fifty Plus. Thank you all for joining me today. And what I'm going to do, I'm going to lead this episode with a little slice of patriotism and how it was exercised, even smack in the middle of a heated argument just this past Sunday at Dyken Park during the game between the Astros and the Rangers. So I'm presuming going into the seventh inning stretch, the Rangers manager Skip Schumacher and umpire Todd Tichenor were in each other's faces pretty hotly over a disputed inning ending strike three call when fans stood up around the entire stadium and began singing God Bless America. And to their credit, both men almost immediately put their beefs on pause. They removed their caps, they turned the flag and honored their country until the final note was sung.
And then they just got right back into the argument, which ultimately led to Schumacher being ejected from the game. That's called having your priorities straight. Country first, baseball second, even at the highest level, even when you're battling for division leadership. And honestly, it's even bigger than that, although a frightening number of people here don't seem to get it. It's actually country first and then everything else second. Because if not for that flag, if not for everything it stands for, including the blood of so many soldiers throughout our history, one nation under God, that baseball game might have never happened. So anyway, I did want to tell all of you about that incident, which really struck me as promising, honestly, that these two, the coach and the manager and the umpire, they were in the middle of a big old fight, right there in the middle of the field. And oops, God bless America's on, time out. So anyway, moving forward now in sort of a special edition of Fifty Plus, I want to talk about the avalanche, I mean, literal avalanche of fraud that's been uncovered in our country in just the past year and a half. I know it's been going on for decades, but never at such scale as we've recently seen, as professional criminals have stepped into the game now to organize what we now know are thousands upon thousands of fraudulent business operations that have quite literally stolen, I don't know, tens of billions, maybe a hundred or two billion. Who knows? It could be any number. But one by one, the people who are running these things are being caught and they're being prosecuted and they're being sent off to prison. The smart ones left early. They packed their bags full of money and took off, transferred money out of here, carried it out in shoe boxes. I don't know, but they got probably billions of dollars out of our country before they got caught. Although there was a woman who was arrested in Jamaica, I think just last week or maybe two weeks ago, she was also one of the ones that was among the most wanted for fraud in this country. Since then, and actually just yesterday, while I was scrolling through Fox News, one story opened up another one and another story and another story and another on that, all about fraud that's being investigated, that's being dragged into the light of day, so that Americans can actually see how badly they've been duped. I actually printed out several pages of stories yesterday, and I'm gonna just kinda touch on little pieces of each one, just to give you an idea how deep this thing runs, how it operates, and how much money we probably have lost. The first story was one that came out of Pennsylvania that said the Justice Department announced that it's expanding its Northeast Health Care Fraud Strike Force into Philadelphia now as federal and state authorities target alleged Medicare and Medicaid fraud involving home health care services. In a nutshell, I guess, what happened was they turned over a few rocks, and every time they turned over a rock, they found ten more rocks that needed to be turned over. And while they had the media's attention, they let it be known that they have charged 19 defendants now who are accused of being part of schemes that total more than $4 million in claims that went to Medicare and Medicaid. That's according to a DOJ release that was obtained by Fox. And to give you a little idea of the sophistication of these things, the people who have been charged are not just the company owners, but in cahoots also are all of their employees, not all of them maybe, but most of them, I guess. They're aides and then Medicaid recipients themselves, who have found ways now to become part of these schemes, these fraudulent schemes, and skim a little off the top for themselves. Some of the rocks that got turned over in this investigation had to do with these home health aides billing Medicaid for services, while they themselves were actually either incarcerated or working other jobs or traveling overseas or hospitalized. In other words, they weren't doing anything that was legitimate to earn those dollars. They were just filling out paperwork and Medicaid was just rubber stamping and paying. And still up there in Pennsylvania, which doesn't, by the way, make the whole Medicare system look very efficient. Some of these home health care aides were alleged to be exceeding 24 hours of care in a single day. And still Medicaid paid the claims. For years, too, this is just all, just remember that all of this I'm talking about has gone on just in perpetuity. I'm going to throw another number at you here, and I'm going to read directly from that Fox story about the fraud going on in Pennsylvania. And it was toward the end of the story. It says here, and I quote, The DOJ said the expansion follows recent additions to the strike force program in California, Arizona, Nevada, Massachusetts, and Minnesota, as well as two national health care fraud enforcement actions involving more than $15 billion in alleged losses in 2025 and more than $6 billion in alleged losses in 2026