President Trump’s slew of last-minute pardons and commutations included several men whom federal courts found guilty of defrauding Medicare or Medicaid:
President Trump granted full pardons to Todd Farha, Thaddeus Bereday, William Kale, Paul Behrens, and Peter Clay, former executives of a healthcare maintenance organization.…In 2008, Messrs. Farha, Bereday, Kale, Behrens, and Clay were criminally prosecuted for a state regulatory matter involving the reporting of expenditures to a state health agency. The expenditures reported were based on actual monies spent, and the reporting methodology was reviewed and endorsed by those with expertise in the state regulatory scheme. Notably, there was no evidence that any of the individuals were motivated by greed…
President Trump commuted the sentence of Salomon Melgen. This commutation is supported by Senator Bob Menendez, Representative Mario Diaz-Balart, numerous members of Brigade 2506, Col. Mark D. Holten, as well as his friends, family, and former employees. Dr. Melgen was convicted of healthcare fraud and false statements.
The amount of fraud in these programs is staggering. Improper payments in Medicaid, for example, exceed one quarter of its $684 billion “budget.” The fraud persists year after year because nobody spends other people’s money as carefully as they spend their own, and sometimes the people who benefit from these frauds lobby to preserve them.
In their 2018 book Overcharged: Why Americans Pay Too Much for Health Care, Cato adjunct scholars Charles Silver and David Hyman provide background information on the allegations against Farha, Clay, and Melgen.
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