Senate Report Details 8 Medicare Scammers Who Each Billed Taxpayers Over $1 Billion, While GSA Flags Another $1.2 Billion in COVID Contract Fraud

Since the Justice Department unveiled Operation Gold Rush, the case tying a Russian-based criminal network to $10.6 billion in fraudulent Medicare claims, federal watchdogs have kept surfacing new billion-dollar fraud schemes almost as fast as they can count them. Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), chair of the Senate DOGE Caucus, released a new report cataloging what it calls "the new robber barons" of American health care.

The report identifies eight individual fraud cases in which a person or small group billed the federal government more than $1 billion each. One case involves an illegal immigrant who billed Medicare $1.3 billion over six months and remains at large, according to the report. Another involves a Filipina nurse who billed $906 million to Medicare and Tricare, the military's health plan. She is free on bail in the United States awaiting trial. A Phoenix couple billed $1.2 billion for unnecessary treatments on hospice patients and were arrested wearing $30,000 watches, the report says.

The report also cites Herbert Kimble, charged with billing Medicare more than $1.2 billion for back braces pushed on patients who didn't need them, and the Operation Gold Rush network, whose 11 charged members allegedly used stolen identities from thousands of doctors and more than a million senior citizens to submit $10.6 billion in claims. Of that, $941 million was actually paid out before investigators caught on.

Across all the cases the report examines, more than $21 billion in bogus claims were billed to the federal government, and more than $3.1 billion of that was actually paid, according to the Senate DOGE Caucus document reviewed by the Daily Signal and AMAC. The report cites a 2024 Government Accountability Office estimate putting total federal fraud losses at $523 billion a year, or roughly $1.4 billion a day, spanning Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, and food assistance.

The scale of oversight compared to spending is stark. Medicare pays out $901 billion a year and Medicaid pays $734 billion, according to figures cited by CNBC, while the Department of Health and Human Services Inspector General has only about 450 agents assigned to catch fraud across both programs. A former Florida-based Medicare fraudster told CNBC bluntly: "It's just so easy. It's unbelievable."

Ernst's Political Argument

Ernst has framed the numbers as a rebuke of Democratic proposals for expanded government-run health care. "Washington is literally making these scammers instant billionaires off the backs of the working class," she said in a statement, adding that a proposed $500 billion Democratic "billionaire tax" wouldn't even cover the $523 billion the government loses to fraud annually. She specifically singled out Sen. Bernie Sanders' past comment that "billionaires shouldn't exist," arguing that federal health programs are minting fraud billionaires instead.

Ernst's argument reflects a political position, not a settled fact about how a universal health system would necessarily perform. Defenders of expanding public coverage could reasonably counter that the vulnerability here is a specific claims-payment design, not an argument against government-run health care as a concept. Private insurers also process and pay claims quickly and are themselves frequent fraud targets. Ernst's own proposed fix, the Protecting American Taxpayers Act, targets exactly that mechanism: it would require payments to be made as reimbursements only after service is completed, bar people convicted of defrauding the government from receiving future federal assistance, and pay bonuses to auditors who catch fraud. Whether that legislative fix, rather than the underlying question of who administers care, addresses the actual failure point is the more precise question the report raises.

GSA Finds Another $1.2 Billion in Dead COVID Contracts

Separately, the General Services Administration announced it identified more than $1.2 billion in suspected fraud across five COVID-era HHS contracts, working under the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud. The COVID-19 national emergency ended in 2023 and related acquisition flexibilities were canceled that year, but GSA Administrator Edward C. Forst said certain contractors kept collecting payments under the old emergency terms anyway.

"The COVID emergency ended over three years ago, yet fraudsters continue to weaponize outdated emergency contracts to abuse taxpayer dollars," Forst said. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said his agency is "following the money, exposing suspected wrongdoing, referring cases to law enforcement, and fighting to recover taxpayer dollars." Task Force Executive Director Scott Brady put it more bluntly: "The emergency is over. So is the free pass." GSA said it also stopped an additional $41 million in suspected fraudulent payments before they went out, and the finding follows the agency's late-August identification of more than $13 billion in suspected contractor fraud government-wide.

Neither report claims these cases represent the full scope of government fraud, only the pieces investigators have managed to document so far. The illegal immigrant who billed Medicare $1.3 billion remains unidentified publicly and at large, according to Ernst's report. This open case will test whether federal investigators can actually claw back money once it's already been paid out.