HHS unearths billions of dollars more in another Medicare fraud scheme
Too many government programs afford “perverse incentives” to take advantage of taxpayer dollars, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said, pointing to examples of doctors profiting from prescribing unnecessarily expensive treatments to patients.
Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced Sept. 29 that President Donald Trump’s administration has uncovered billions more taxpayer dollars stolen through Medicare fraud. He faulted “perverse incentives” in HHS programs that made fraud not only possible but attractive.
“We gave the people opportunity to steal, and we made it almost irresistible,” he said, speaking at the Make America Healthy conference alongside Vice President JD Vance, who leads the White House anti-fraud task force.
As an example, Kennedy cited a “skin substitutes” program, where doctors use simulated skin to cover certain wounds. Since the doctors who prescribed the “skin substitutes” were given 6% of the sales cost, they were “incentivized” to prescribe “more expensive products,” he said.
In 2019, HHS made $200 million in Medicare reimbursements to the program. By 2025, the program cost taxpayers $14 billion. For 2026, the program was on track to cost taxpayers $23 billion.
“All stolen. It's all stolen,” Kennedy said. “And we stopped it, we put an end to it. We’ve now driven that down, driven that cost down to somewhere around $1 billion and we saved that money, but it was allowed to get out of control.”
>> Treasury uncovers $17.5B in healthcare fraud schemes <<
In August, the White House launched a “fraud ledger,” as Zeale News previously reported, to keep track of the total sum of taxpayer dollars defrauded through various programs. As of Oct. 6, the ledger has discovered more than $260 billion in fraud since January 2025.
The largest share of fraud has been uncovered in the Small Business Administration ($122.9 billion) and in HHS ($96.4 billion). Large sums of fraud have also been discovered in the Department of Labor ($20.9 billion), General Services Administration ($13.9 billion), Department of Housing and Urban Development ($2.4 billion), Department of Education ($2 billion), and Department of Homeland Security ($1.7 billion).
>> Vance highlights billions in fraud uncovered by White House task force <<
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