Tim Rice

Thanks for having me, Georgia.

So there was obviously this huge press conference that the vice president had, along with FTC chairman Andrew Ferguson and Dr. Oz, who runs the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

But let's take a step back, because even before this press conference, the White House announced early yesterday morning that they were suspending Medicare home health programs until they could figure out what was going on with this fraud.

Now, I did not misspeak there.

I said Medicare, not Medicaid.

It

Luke Rosiak, our colleague, has reported on Medicaid fraud.

Medicaid is a jointly administered program between the federal and state governments that serves poor people, right?

Lower income, you know, indigent populations.

It is administered by states, jointly funded by the federal government and state governments.

So the federal government can't just shut down Medicaid programs because technically they're state-run programs.

What they can do is they can act unilaterally in Medicare, which is the government-run health care for elderly Americans, which is entirely federally controlled.

So the Trump administration is really taking a whole-of-government approach to shutting down the kind of fraud that Luke has uncovered.

Now, this brings us to 2 p.m.

yesterday when the vice president got up to give his remarks.

The first thing that he said was that the Trump administration is deferring $1.3 billion in Medicaid reimbursements to the state of California, right?

So this is something that the federal government can do.

They can say, well, we can't shut your program down, but until you start taking fraud seriously, we're not going to reimburse you.

So this is a serious threat, and it goes really hand in glove with the main thing the vice president announced yesterday, which is that his new task force, the joint task force in his office and the FTC, are sending letters to all 50 state Medicaid programs saying, we are sending Medicaid fraud control units to your state.

We are going to start investigating fraud.