A friend and correspondent shared some thoughts regarding the massive amount of Medicare and Medicaid billing fraud that various efforts are digging out. Among other claims, supposedly $42 billion in fraudulent invoicing by health care providers (many as fake as the Minnesota Somalian-related child care centers) was avoided in 2025 alone.
But the fraudsters are not limited to private (criminal) enterprises, nor to corrupt State and local officials. Yet another correspondent shared more.
Consider now corrupt Medicare and Medicaid, the court system and insanity, beef, and the Epstein mess. Readers, share your thoughts!
Regarding Medicare, had a conversation with a friend a couple of days ago regarding a family who got hit by Medicare billing of the patient. A man had given the maximum allowable non-taxable gift (as I recall, $13,500) to several family members a year or more before he died. The disease that killed him was one that developed fairly rapidly, starting months after he gave the family the gifts. The last few months of his life, he ran up a huge (hundred-thousand dollar or more) Medicare cost for the treatment which failed. A few months after his death, a Medicare bureaucrat demanded that all the recipients of his gifts pay the full amount of the gifts to Medicare to offset some of the costs of his treatment.
If this is all accurate, it seems that the fake labs and health care providers are not the only ones stealing money: the agency itself is also stealing money. And no doubt, employees of that government agency. Did we not see the same thing with Faucet in the CDC?
Still, the billions and billions of fraud (prevented and discovered) are staggering. How many years back to, say, Clinton or Obama – or even all the way back to LBJ – were fraud payments NOT prevented? In 35 years, if the average was only, say, $30 billion a year, that is over a trillion dollars! “Real money,” even by today’s standards.
The trial and outcome (so far) of the homicidal ex-mother of three dead Massachusetts children has again reignited discussion of capital crimes, the death penalty, and the powers of juries and judges. We are not simply talking about procedures and systems for dealing with “reasonable doubt” and hung juries, nor about when attorneys need to be disbarred for malpractice, including outing jury members when they don’t like the jury member’s decision. We are also talking about fundamentals of the justice (well, court) system. And what justice really means. Again, our correspondent discussed this issue, and will follow up on a still-more-touchy subject: what will this one case do to the political system in all Fifty States over the next few years? Will it lead to a fundamental shift in the trust placed in women in positions of political authority, administration of justice, and even with responsibilities for the national defense? We will wait and see!
Another topic which is big in the Great Plains States is beef. At the same time that the administration is courting ranchers by promising to reduce red tape and regulatory nightmares, it is also dealing a severe blow to those same ranchers.
The Donald announced recently that he is authorizing legal action to give American ranchers the right to process and sell their own beef — directly challenging what he called a “nasty monopoly” held by four meatpacking conglomerates that control roughly 85% of U.S. beef processing capacity (Tyson Foods, Cargill, JBS, and National Beef) have been investigated by DOJ for antitrust violations since November 2025. But at the same time, POTUS separately announced a 90-day suspension of tariffs on imported ground beef, aiming to bring prices down while the longer-term fix is implemented. The White House just ordered over 300,000 metric tons of foreign-produced ground beef to be imported and sold (tariff-free and 25% below market rate.
The entire beef mess seems to be one of the President’s more serious mistakes, with this seemingly-un- (or little) managed import of beef. And exactly who or what has allowed the Big Four to manipulate the benchmarks? Could that be the permanent bureaucracy, the “Deep State” and Congress? And if so, how much of that is not under the President’s control? To fully break up the Big Four oligopoly, do we not need to figure out why that oligopoly exists in the first place? Is it not possible that the statutory and regulatory system created by Congress and in essence running loose for 110 years or so has been the major reason for this concentration?
She also touched on the Epstein case. TPOL has a number of correspondents who have thrown up their hands in complete disgust because of the handling of the Epstein business by Trump appointees. This also lends credence to the idea that Epstein was (and perhaps still is) considered a highly-valued asset of the federal intelligence community and thus protected by them – and with his sick activities even encouraged by them? If Epstein had done only half of what has been documented, he makes Hugh Hefner and that Hustler guy look like angels. But we know that the morals of far too many prominent American politicians going back a century (or more) were so ungodly as to be only what we would expect of Satan’s pawns: FDR, JFK, LBJ, RMN, and even Ike (at least during WW2) demonstrated their total disdain for simple, biblical morality in their private lives. Does that not bleed over into their public actions?
About TPOL Nathan
Follower of Christ Jesus (a christian), Pahasapan (resident of the Black Hills), Westerner, Lover of Liberty, Free-Market Anarchist, Engineer, Army Officer, Husband, Father, Historian, Writer, Evangelist. Successor to Lady Susan (Mama Liberty) at TPOL.
The Price of Liberty 
This and that on a hot late summer afternoon
A friend and correspondent shared some thoughts regarding the massive amount of Medicare and Medicaid billing fraud that various efforts are digging out. Among other claims, supposedly $42 billion in fraudulent invoicing by health care providers (many as fake as the Minnesota Somalian-related child care centers) was avoided in 2025 alone.
But the fraudsters are not limited to private (criminal) enterprises, nor to corrupt State and local officials. Yet another correspondent shared more.
Consider now corrupt Medicare and Medicaid, the court system and insanity, beef, and the Epstein mess. Readers, share your thoughts!
Regarding Medicare, had a conversation with a friend a couple of days ago regarding a family who got hit by Medicare billing of the patient. A man had given the maximum allowable non-taxable gift (as I recall, $13,500) to several family members a year or more before he died. The disease that killed him was one that developed fairly rapidly, starting months after he gave the family the gifts. The last few months of his life, he ran up a huge (hundred-thousand dollar or more) Medicare cost for the treatment which failed. A few months after his death, a Medicare bureaucrat demanded that all the recipients of his gifts pay the full amount of the gifts to Medicare to offset some of the costs of his treatment.
If this is all accurate, it seems that the fake labs and health care providers are not the only ones stealing money: the agency itself is also stealing money. And no doubt, employees of that government agency. Did we not see the same thing with Faucet in the CDC?
Still, the billions and billions of fraud (prevented and discovered) are staggering. How many years back to, say, Clinton or Obama – or even all the way back to LBJ – were fraud payments NOT prevented? In 35 years, if the average was only, say, $30 billion a year, that is over a trillion dollars! “Real money,” even by today’s standards.
The trial and outcome (so far) of the homicidal ex-mother of three dead Massachusetts children has again reignited discussion of capital crimes, the death penalty, and the powers of juries and judges. We are not simply talking about procedures and systems for dealing with “reasonable doubt” and hung juries, nor about when attorneys need to be disbarred for malpractice, including outing jury members when they don’t like the jury member’s decision. We are also talking about fundamentals of the justice (well, court) system. And what justice really means. Again, our correspondent discussed this issue, and will follow up on a still-more-touchy subject: what will this one case do to the political system in all Fifty States over the next few years? Will it lead to a fundamental shift in the trust placed in women in positions of political authority, administration of justice, and even with responsibilities for the national defense? We will wait and see!
Another topic which is big in the Great Plains States is beef. At the same time that the administration is courting ranchers by promising to reduce red tape and regulatory nightmares, it is also dealing a severe blow to those same ranchers.
The Donald announced recently that he is authorizing legal action to give American ranchers the right to process and sell their own beef — directly challenging what he called a “nasty monopoly” held by four meatpacking conglomerates that control roughly 85% of U.S. beef processing capacity (Tyson Foods, Cargill, JBS, and National Beef) have been investigated by DOJ for antitrust violations since November 2025. But at the same time, POTUS separately announced a 90-day suspension of tariffs on imported ground beef, aiming to bring prices down while the longer-term fix is implemented. The White House just ordered over 300,000 metric tons of foreign-produced ground beef to be imported and sold (tariff-free and 25% below market rate.
The entire beef mess seems to be one of the President’s more serious mistakes, with this seemingly-un- (or little) managed import of beef. And exactly who or what has allowed the Big Four to manipulate the benchmarks? Could that be the permanent bureaucracy, the “Deep State” and Congress? And if so, how much of that is not under the President’s control? To fully break up the Big Four oligopoly, do we not need to figure out why that oligopoly exists in the first place? Is it not possible that the statutory and regulatory system created by Congress and in essence running loose for 110 years or so has been the major reason for this concentration?
She also touched on the Epstein case. TPOL has a number of correspondents who have thrown up their hands in complete disgust because of the handling of the Epstein business by Trump appointees. This also lends credence to the idea that Epstein was (and perhaps still is) considered a highly-valued asset of the federal intelligence community and thus protected by them – and with his sick activities even encouraged by them? If Epstein had done only half of what has been documented, he makes Hugh Hefner and that Hustler guy look like angels. But we know that the morals of far too many prominent American politicians going back a century (or more) were so ungodly as to be only what we would expect of Satan’s pawns: FDR, JFK, LBJ, RMN, and even Ike (at least during WW2) demonstrated their total disdain for simple, biblical morality in their private lives. Does that not bleed over into their public actions?
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About TPOL Nathan
Follower of Christ Jesus (a christian), Pahasapan (resident of the Black Hills), Westerner, Lover of Liberty, Free-Market Anarchist, Engineer, Army Officer, Husband, Father, Historian, Writer, Evangelist. Successor to Lady Susan (Mama Liberty) at TPOL.