“This is way beyond the pale; the OIG report says nothing about fraud. Nothing.”
- Janet Mills, February 12
“Maine will not be intimidated by the threats of a President who is using allegations of fraud as a pretext to hurt people. We will fight back.”
- Janet Mills, March 6
“Okay, yes, the Maine Wire was right all along. I was lying before. Now that my idiotic Senate run sh*t the bed, I can admit that we’ve been scrambling to clean up all the fraud the Maine Wire is finding. It’s embarrassing that a bunch of journalists we’ve been trying to marginalize keep exposing fraud while we’re trying to get taxes increased. Why can’t they just report on clam festivals and car accidents like the other guys? It really makes us look like we’re criminal co-conspirators or criminally incompetent.”
- Janet Mills, last week (some artistic license taken)
The Mills Administration is furious that CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz visited Maine for an interview with Jon Fetherston outside of the former headquarters of the now-defunct Paradise Residential Services, a $25 million group home fraud.
But given what the state has now admitted about its limited welfare fraud successes, it seems Maine taxpayers would be better off if state officials stopped stonewalling the Maine Wire and started asking us for help.
In case you missed it: Oz, the nation’s top authority on Medicaid fraud, talked to Fetherston last week about his office’s investigation into group homes for adults with autism. That investigation builds on an earlier investigation of autism programs for children that found systemic errors and massive fraud risk. In comments to the left-wing media, Mills Administration toadies attacked Oz for daring to meet with Fetherston rather than talk to them.
Over at the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), the reaction was thin-skinned and amateurish. The communications team released a vague blog post bragging about anti-fraud efforts. Upon scrutiny, the actions the post touted were almost all old news.
But the biggest takeaway is that DHHS’s actions behind the scenes are totally different than the “Hear No Evil, See No Evil, Speak No Evil” stance Mills and Maine Democrats have taken when it comes to welfare fraud. Mills and her allies have attacked anyone who exposes fraud or questions why politically connected groups like Gateway Community Services were allowed to get away with fraud for so long.
Yet now we know they’ve been talking out of both sides of their mouths. At the same time they’ve brushed aside concerns that Maine is the next Minnesota, they have quietly scrambled to stop the flow of tens of millions of taxpayer dollars into suspect Medicaid agencies.
Thanks to the documents released in response to a Freedom of Access Act request last week, we now know that, in many cases, DHHS only began taking action once the Maine Wire started putting a spotlight on bad actors billing MaineCare.
Maine Wire Reporter Seamus Othot had two stories yesterday — each highlighting an instance where the Mills Administration scrambled to crack down on credible fraud allegations in the wake of his reporting.
In April, the Maine Wire paid a visit to Community Home Health Care to ask some questions about how the agency managed to rake in $47,986,855 in taxpayer money from 2019 through 2025. Federal payments data showed that this business, run by Noora Abd, was billing near the theoretical maximum for a home health care agency with the number of clients Abd claimed. Just based on the math, the MaineCare agency looked suspect.
By June, the Mills Administration had suspended payments to Community Home Health Care, citing credible allegations of fraud.
Likewise, the Maine Wire twice visited a cluster of MaineCare providers at 203 Anderson St. in Portland in December and January. We were curious because the agencies located in that building were billing millions of dollars while sharing an office with a Dahabshiil, the preferred money transmitter of the Central Bank of Somalia.
As we noted in our Jan. 22 report, state records showed the combined annual billing for the five agencies in the building had climbed from $901,126.85 in 2019 to $4,057,917.75 in 2024. We even watched as a Brinks man walked out of the building with a massive bag of cash.
According to documents the Mills Administration released last week, DHHS swooped in to suspend payments to a multi-million dollar MaineCare agency operating in that building just eight days later.
Those are not the only instances where the Maine Wire has been months ahead of the state in exposing fraud. See, e.g., Gateway Community Services. More will be coming soon.
So the question worth asking would seem to be not why Dr. Oz is talking to the Maine Wire, but why isn’t the Mills Administration?
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.