Minnesota continues to pay for health care for people who live in other states or are dead
Acting US Attorney Joe Thompson announced Thursday that eight defendants are being charged with stealing millions from a Medicaid housing program aimed at helping recovering addicts find a place to live. The scheme is not novel. The crooks bill the government for helping people but provide little or no services.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz fired Assistant Commissioner Eric Grumdahl who was in charge The Housing Stabilization Services (HSS) at the MN Dept of Human Services. Walz did so the day before Thompson made the announcement.
But Thompson’s frustration was evident in the fraud across Minnesota state government programs. “I have spent my career as a fraud prosecutor and the depth of the fraud in Minnesota takes my breath away” Thompson said.
The Feeding our Futures (food delivery) scam was run through the Minnesota Department of Education. The Housing Stabilization money is from Medicaid, through the Minnesota Dept of Human Services. Why is food money flowing through DHS and housing grants going through Medicaid?
If you are a crook, it’s easier to steal housing grants from Medicaid than from HUD. Nobody at the Minnesota Department of Education got suspicious even as many Feeding our Future crooks claimed to be feeding thousands of children every day and were feeding none. The crooks are here because the money is easy to steal.
In the woke world of the 2020s, education is primarily about nutrition and healthcare is primarily about housing. Approaching health care through the lens of social determinants of health, equity comes from removing disadvantages in access to food or housing to create (so goes the hope) health and education outcomes that are not distorted. It is an absolute truth that the chances of recovery from addiction increase when the recovering addict has stable housing. But that doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea to shovel health care money into housing stabilization.
A “Housing is Healthcare” narrative contends that health equity will be achieved quicker if more people have nicer places to live. If more money is spent on housing, much money will be saved downstream on addiction treatment. Of course, that’s not true if you pour the money down a rat hole instead of spending it on a house. Even if you do spend some of it on a house, it’s hard to measure any “saved” money that would have been spent on addiction recovery.
Rational decision-makers would not use the same bucket of money for both because it makes it easy to steal.