During an appearance on Fox Business Network’s “The Evening Edit,” Rep. Greg Steube (R-FL) explained how some blue states turned a blind eye to fraud related to federal government programs, in particular Medicaid.
The Florida Republican reacted to comments from Vice President JD Vance, who said Democrat blue states were not investigating and prosecuting fraud.
Vance explained, “The Hawaii Medicaid Program has received billions and billions of dollars from the federal taxpayers. Guess how many convictions or indictments has Hawaii had over the last few years in its Medicaid fraud program? The answer is zero. Not a single indictment, not a single conviction. That means that if you’re committing fraud in Medicaid in Hawaii, you have had effectively free reign from the government of Hawaii to commit as much fraud as you want. That is a complete disgrace. New York has had nine indictments over the last year, nine indictments. That’s a $100 billion Medicaid program just in New York. Indiana, which has about a third of the population of the state of the New York, has had more than four times as many indictments over the same period.”
According to Steube, those states were allowing fraud to drive up spending numbers for those government programs.
Host Elizabeth MacDonald said, “You see what the Vice President is saying, Congressman, that basically, blue states are not interested in discovering fraud, but red Republican states are. What’s going on here?”
Steube replied, “Yes, they’re absolutely — they are perpetuating the fraud in these Democratic states because they want to drive up the number of the amount of money that comes to those states on these federal programs. I certainly hope that, with the President and the Vice President focused on this, that the DOJ is going to look at this, and the way that we can keep this from happening is keep federal dollars from going to these states until they go after this fraud, waste and abuse that’s happening.”
MacDonald said, “Do you see those states responding to that withholding of that money that they don’t like that?”
Steube answered, “They absolutely will respond when they’re not getting the federal dollars to pay for all of these programs.”
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