On July 21, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) Jr. announced that $1 billion in Medicaid payments to California and Minnesota, heavily Democratic states, would be paused due to alleged fraud. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz joined him in this announcement, demanding that the two states in contention “provide documentation that these payments are legitimate.”
The bulk of the payment, $867.5 million, will be deferred from California, while $199 million will be deferred from Minnesota. While it is a fact that Medicaid fraud occurs in these two states, with Minnesota’s state legislative auditor bringing attention to fourteen at-risk areas for fraud, they are not the only two. In fact, according to Becker’s Hospital Review, in a document cited by House Republicans in 2022, Texas suffered from the most Medicaid fraud in the country, with Florida coming in third place, and Louisiana in a close fourth. All three are heavily Republican states. As Governors Tim Walz of Minnesota and Gavin Newsom of California noted, this amounts to political retribution against Democratic states.
Just three days after this announcement, The New York Times caught Trump officials admitting that they were cutting off funding to Democratic states for the sake of political vengeance, not financial discrepancies.
