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- Dr. Oz Calls Medicare Fraud an Epidemic. Trump Keeps Pardoning the Culprits.
On Tuesday, the oversight and investigations arm of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce held a hearing to discuss alleged Medicare and Medicaid fraud—a major talking point of the Trump administration and Robert F. Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services, which have deployed fraud claims to help justify cuts to critical funding and programs used by a huge swath of aging, disabled, and low-income Americans. “For too long, states have been permitted to run Medicaid programs with weak guardrails, making them easy targets for criminals to exploit,” subcommittee chair John Joyce (R-Pa.) said in his opening statement. “Under the leadership of Dr. Mehmet Oz, this administration is taking bold steps to stop this fraud more than any other presidential administration before it.” There are false and exaggerated claims in systems the size of Medicare and Medicaid—both Republican and Democratic members agreed that fraud from providers does exist. But only Democratic members raised concerns that withholding Medicaid funds from Minnesota, for example—where investigations into large-scale social services fraud have become a major conservative talking point—will hurt disabled and aging people, as well as children. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz, who has made similar allegations about “ethnic” fraud in the Los Angeles area, was not present, something Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) took offense to. “I think he’s just a grandstander who likes to go on TV but doesn’t really do anything substantively that’s meaningful to help Medicare and Medicaid recipients,” Pallone said. In Oz’s absence, CMS deputy administrator Kimberly Brandt claimed that the agency’s “fraud war room” was using artificial intelligence to root out alleged Medicare and Medicaid fraud, particularly increased rates of home and community-based services billing in New York and California. “We are constantly using heat maps and data analysis to be able to look and see where we think the largest shifts are,” Brandt said. A recent article published in the Health Affairs journal by four academics focusing on health and disability warned that such a focus by the Trump administration could lead to HCBS, an optional Medicaid program, being further dismantled. “Growth in HCBS spending does not reflect evidence of systemic corruption but rather bipartisan federal policy choices, demographic change, and structured statutory evolution,” they wrote. It is also not an easy process to qualify for HCBS, with each process slightly different per state, and over half a… [TheTopNews] Read More.17 hours ago - Joe Kent Resigns From Trump Administration Over Iran WarJoe Kent has resigned as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center in protest of President Donald Trump’s ongoing war against Iran. Kent, a twice-failed Washington congressional candidate aligned with the isolationist MAGA right, is the highest-ranking Trump official to quit because of the war. But Kent didn’t portray the president as the real villain in the lengthy resignation letter that he posted on X on Tuesday. That distinction goes to Israel and its supporters in the United States. “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation,” Kent wrote, “and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.” Kent went on to argue that in the letter “high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media” launched a “misinformation campaign” early in Trump’s current term that undermined his America First agenda. Writing directly to Trump, Kent argued that this “echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States.” He added the Israelis had used the same approach to “draw us into the disastrous Iraq war.” Trump, of course, is the president of the United States and commander-in-chief of the most powerful military in the world—not some hapless victim of Israeli deception. He willingly joined Israel to initiate the current war, despite the apparent reservations of some of his senior advisers. It was his responsibility to determine what was in the best interests of the United States, and he failed spectacularly in that task. It is certainly true that Israel played a major role in pushing Trump towards war. Netanyahu has wanted the United States to attack Iran for decades, and he finally found a willing accomplice in the second-term version of Trump. It was not for nothing that a New York Times article headlined “How Trump Decided to Go to War” began with Netanyahu walking into the Oval Office in February determined to keep Trump “on the path to war.” The Israeli leader was particularly concerned that the Trump administration’s efforts to reach a diplomatic solution with Iran would prevent the battle he longed for. After the war began, Secretary of State Marco Rubio all but admitted that the United States had been dragged into the war by its ally. “We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an… [TheTopNews] Read More.17 hours ago
- How Blue States Got Around the GOP’s Efforts to Ban Abortion in Red StatesWhen Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill announced last month that she was planning to sue the governors of New York and California for refusing to extradite doctors accused of mailing abortion pills to her state, Gavin Newsom was unfazed. “@AGLizMurrill: Go fuck yourself,” he mocked on X. “California will never help you criminalize healthcare.” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul didn’t bother responding. But she’d already made her position clear last year. “I will not be signing an extradition order that came from the governor of Louisiana,” Hochul said at a news conference. “Not now, not ever.” This pushback—and the fact that, weeks later, Murrill still hasn’t followed through on her threat—says a great deal about the surprising reality of abortion access almost four years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, making abortion a states’ rights issue. Put simply, the abortion-access movement is winning. That’s thanks largely to “shield” laws—blue-state statutes that protect abortion providers and helpers from being investigated, prosecuted, sued, and harassed for providing care to patients living in places where abortion is illegal. Shield laws are designed to thwart the near-total abortion bans and other restrictions that have proliferated in red states since the 2022 Dobbs decision. Broadly speaking, these measures prohibit law enforcement and state agencies from engaging in actions that could help abortion opponents bring criminal or civil cases against abortion doctors, helpers, or patients. In most shield-law states, police can’t serve arrest warrants; court clerks can’t issue subpoenas; IT staff can’t comply with records requests, and governors can’t sign extradition orders. So far, 22 states and Washington, DC, have created some version of shield protections; eight of those states, including New York and California, have adopted laws that explicitly protect people who provide or facilitate abortion care via telemedicine. The laws have proven to be “one of the strongest tools that reproductive freedom advocates have to protect abortion access in a post-Roe reality,” says Ashley Kurzweil, a senior policy analyst at the National Partnership for Women & Families. “It’s painfully obvious that anti-abortion extremists are targeting shield laws because they are working.” “It’s painfully obvious that anti-abortion extremists are targeting shield laws because they are working.” The best evidence of the laws’ effectiveness comes from the Society of Family Planning’s #WeCount project, which has been tracking changes in the volume of abortions since just before Roe fell. In the most recent data,… [TheTopNews] Read More.1 day ago
- Warming Oceans and Waterways Threaten a Key Human Protein SourceThis story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In the world’s waters, fish are making a quiet, biological retreat. The once simple rules of the ocean—grow larger than potential predators—are being rewritten as temperatures reach record highs. Desperate to survive, fish are hitting the fast-forward button on life in a biological shift that will soon impact what ends up on dinner tables globally. “There are simply no real winners here.” Fish are getting smaller and dying at higher rates as they adapt to warming waters, researchers warn in a report released Thursday in the journal Science. This evolutionary change will reduce global fish yields by one-fifth under current warming predictions, and up to 30 percent in high-emissions scenarios. This will trigger potentially irreversible evolutionary processes, shaking up entire ecosystems and food webs, with consequences for the billions of people who rely on seafood for protein—a demand expected to increase. “What I found frightening about this work was that it was difficult to identify winners and losers—there are simply no real winners here,” said Craig White, the study’s co-author and an evolutionary physiologist at Monash University in Australia. “The combination of warming and evolution was always bad for fisheries.” Fish mortality rates have already been rising as waters warm. Although fisheries management often assumes fish are evolutionarily inert when it comes to overcoming such environmental changes, this is false. Instead, fish are maturing at a younger age and at a smaller size to improve their chances of surviving long enough to reproduce, according to the report. Fishery yields were already expected to reduce by 14 percent when global temperatures reach 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. However, when incorporating evolutionary impacts, the researchers’ new model predicts this reduction worsens to 22 percent. For the Alaska pollock—a key species for human consumption in North America—this would equate to a reduction of half a million metric tons harvested per year. “This is a loss of over 1.1 billion meals of high-quality protein per year as a consequence of the effects of global warming on just one species,” said David Reznick, a professor of evolutionary ecology at the University of California, Riverside, who was not involved with the study but co-wrote a new piece about it in Science. “Climate change represents an immediate threat to the earth’s capacity to sustain human life.” Decades of decreases in size, age at maturity… [TheTopNews] Read More.1 day ago
- The Minneapolis “Dirtbag Lawyer” Challenging ICE Detentions—and WinningOn January 7, Daniel Suitor raced the less than half a mile from his home to the spot where a federal immigration agent had just killed Renée Good in Minneapolis. He had heard from a local group chat that someone had been shot, and he wanted to bear witness. At the scene, Suitor, a lawyer, started talking to witnesses. One observer who had recorded the incident shared the video with Suitor, who sent it to local authorities and the press and posted it on social media. Soon, the images were everywhere. For most Americans, the shocking killing of Good, followed by government officials’ “domestic terrorism” claims, brought into stark relief the brutality of the immigration enforcement operations the Trump administration unleashed in cities across the country. In the weeks after the shootings of Good and then Alex Pretti, public sentiment has reportedly turned against the crackdown and the actions of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. That watershed moment proved to be a catalyst for Suitor, who, until now, primarily represented Minnesota tenants in various disputes. A couple of days after Good’s death, while recovering from emergency gallbladder surgery, he started to consider how to best employ his University of Minnesota law degree. He put his sole practice on hold and stopped taking on new cases. “It’s all hands on deck for the legal community,” Suitor declared on LinkedIn, issuing a call to action to other legal practitioners. “When this is over, will you be able to say you were one of the helpers? Which side are you on?” Earlier this year, the self-described “nobody lawyer” and “dipshit with a 7-year-old laptop and a bad attitude,” Suitor turned to helping immigrants in Minnesota who have been swept up in the immigration enforcement dragnet and detained by ICE. Undeterred by his lack of immigration law experience, he has joined the ranks of attorneys nationwide filing so-called habeas corpus petitions in a massive legal counteroffensive to the Trump administration’s aggressive mass detention and deportation practices. Here, Suitor describes his own experiences in this work. His observations have been edited for length and clarity. I grew up in New Hampshire and spent most of my first few decades in New England. I moved here [to Minnesota] to go to law school. It was 2018, I was 29 years old, and I didn’t like my corporate job [as a financial analyst]. It… [TheTopNews] Read More.1 day ago
- The Border Wall Is Back
Photographs by Philip CheungAt Coronado National Memorial in Arizona, the demolition crews blowing up national-park land tend to announce explosions at least a day in advance, as a warning for hikers to stay away. The crews have been working their way up the western slope of the park for the past couple of months, right along the international boundary with Mexico. President Trump’s border wall needs a smooth, straight path, and there are mountains in the way.Trump didn’t build along this stretch of the border during his first term, but his crews are now working at a furious pace. They have already completed about five miles of 30-foot-tall barrier, painted jet black at the president’s insistence because he thought it looked more intimidating and would be hotter to the touch.I watched them on a recent afternoon from an overlook, at a safe distance from the blast. To the west was the San Rafael Valley, a rolling yellow grassland that is one of the last wild open spaces along the U.S.-Mexico border. Ringed by mountains, it has served as a setting for John Wayne Westerns and episodes of Little House on the Prairie. I saw no power lines, paved roads, or other signs of human presence, aside from the new camp where Trump’s workers were sleeping in trailers and crushing rocks to make concrete for the wall’s base. They had about 20 more miles to go to finish the whole valley, one of the last places in southeast Arizona that hasn’t been walled off.Trump spent about $11 billion to build 450 miles of border barrier in his first term, one of the most expensive federal-infrastructure projects in U.S. history. He faced a lot of pushback too. The federal government shut down in December 2018 for a then-record 35 days when Democrats refused to give Trump $5 billion for border-wall funding. But last summer, Trump got nearly 10 times that amount for the wall—$46.5 billion—when Republicans pushed through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.The money has imbued the project with an aura of inevitability, wiping away the financial and topographical considerations that restrained Trump’s first-term ambitions. John F. Kelly, Trump’s first homeland-security secretary, used to say that building a wall “from sea to shining sea” made no sense over steep mountain ranges where few people enter illegally. Construction through those areas can be wildly expensive, costing more than $40 million a mile.… [TheTopNews] Read More.1 day ago
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