The U.S. government spends more than $900 billion annually on Medicaid. How much of that money is stolen by criminals? HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. pegs the theft total at $100 billion. I am going to embed the entire quote in the tweet below:

RFK Jr. says HHS loses $100,000,000,000 a year to theft.

He found some thieves would bribe poor people with flat screen TVs to get their patient numbers and enroll them in hospice.

Then they would proceed to bill Medicaid "$6,000 a month FOREVER."

RFK JR: "We shut down 800… pic.twitter.com/fp86zRt3oV

— The Vigilant Fox 🦊 (@VigilantFox) July 18, 2026

RFK JR: “We shut down 800 hospices. You know what a hospice is? Where you’re going to die. Typically, if you go to a hospice, you leave within 18 days because your dying is terminal.”

“We started looking at these hospices in Los Angeles, and the people never died. Two or three years later they were there, and we’re paying $6,000 a month.”

“We found a hotel room with 29 hospices in it. I mean a hotel, every room was a hospice, and none of them had any patients. They were just addresses.”

“The guys who own them, they were Estonians and Armenians and people from Eastern Europe who were getting the patient numbers. They were stealing them from doctors’ offices.”

“They were also going into poor neighborhoods in Los Angeles and they’d say to the people, ‘We’ll give you this $375 flat-screen TV. You give us your patient number and we’re going to enroll you in this hospice. You don’t ever have to go. We’re just going to enroll you,’ and then we’ll charge Medicaid $6,000 a month forever. And the guy never dies, of course, because he was never sick.”

“We didn’t get a single call from a congressman or from a business owner saying, ‘Oh, you shut down my hospice and all these patients are on the street.’ None of them, because they were all crooked and they knew they were crooked.”

The theft is incredibly brazen. And I suspect Kennedy’s $100 billion estimate may be low. In Minnesota, the authorities have estimated that at least one-half of the total spending on 14 Medicaid programs went to fraud. While our state government is uniquely incompetent, it may well be that other states approach those numbers. The fraud is probably less with regard to bills from doctors, clinics and hospitals, but there too, it is substantial, usually in the form of upcoding.

At some point, one begins to wonder whether a central purpose of our government is to fund crime. If the purpose of an institution is what it does, supporting and encouraging criminals would seem to be an important aim of our government, both federal and state.