Michigan's Medicaid Fraud Out in the Open
State senator teams up with Senior Fellow Walter Curt at press conference to blow the lid off the Michigan fraud machine.
In Lansing on April 30, Michigan Senate Republican Leader Aric Nesbitt announced that he has sent a letter to the Department of Justice and the Trump administration's fraud task force asking the federal government to investigate Michigan's Medicaid system. Rep. Jamie Thompson—Vice Chair of the House Health Policy Committee, and a practicing nurse—stood with him. So did I.
Medicaid fraud in Michigan is a straight-up scam, and the pattern is impossible to miss.
— Walter Curt (@wcdispatch) April 30, 2026
Democrats take over the legislature, change the billing codes… and BOOM––Medicaid spending explodes within months using those exact new codes.
This isn’t just Michigan. It’s happening in… pic.twitter.com/HJV4z1MOqz
The DOJ referral cites the billing surges, the dissolved corporations, and the empty addresses we've uncovered over the past several months. State lawmakers don't hold press conferences alongside an independent investigative reporter unless they think the case needs attention.
Activating State and Federal Investigations
Sen. Nesbitt confirmed that the Auditor General has accepted his request for a full audit of Michigan's childcare program—the same category of program now producing federal indictments in Minnesota. His office is taking statewide tips, and the most credible ones are being routed to OAG and DOJ.
Rep. Thompson took the patient-care angle. Roughly 2.6 million Michiganders have enrolled in Medicaid, nearly a million of them children. She walked through a case from her clinical experience: a child billed for $152 EEGs that were never performed, then prescribed narcotics for an epilepsy diagnosis the child didn't have. That isn't a billing error. It's a fabricated medical record with a real child and real narcotics attached to it—fraud paid for by Medicaid but absorbed by the patient. She also pointed to a recent Auditor General report finding that an $82 million pharmacy-management contract monitored by six full-time employees doing desk reviews—the kind of staffing ratio that only exists when nobody at the agency treats field verification as part of the job. "If I were that negligent with patients," she said, "I would lose my job."
Nesbitt had more blunt things to say about the agency itself. He described the response from the state Department of Health and Human Services to legislative oversight requests as "complete stonewall."
That's the part that matters. The records are not hidden. They sit in Michigan's business registry (LARA), the federal provider database (NPPES), Medicaid claims, and the federal contractor registry (SAM.gov). And they line up. The reason the fraud has continued isn't that it's invisible. The agency responsible for stopping it has simply refused to look. A federal referral changes the math, because federal investigators don't need DHHS to cooperate.
Providers I tracked ran near-zero billing for months or years, then began billing roughly $280,000 a month within weeks of the legislative changes that opened the relevant codes. That doesn't happen by accident. Somebody told them. Who tipped them off, and how, are questions that don't get answered by another departmental self-review—they get answered by investigators with subpoena power.
Nesbitt placed the press conference inside a longer arc. The Auditor General previously documented roughly $8.5 billion in unemployment fraud during the pandemic, and nobody at the agency responsible has been held accountable. Thompson took it a step further and named DHHS Director Elizabeth Hertel directly, citing constituent calls about benefits getting shut off without notice and a department phone system that has effectively gone dark on the people it's supposed to serve. The pattern—money goes out, the agency declines to track it, no one gets fired, the next program opens—demonstrates that the state itself is the actual problem. Medicaid is just where the meter is currently running highest.
The broader number sits underneath all of it. Michigan's state spending increased roughly 50% over the past eight years, and Medicaid spending tracks the same curve. Nobody at DHHS, in either party, bothers to claim patient outcomes have improved by anything close to that ratio. The money went somewhere. Some of it went to care. A meaningful share of it did not.
We're not done, but the question now is whether the radical left running Lansing will do anything at all.
DIG DEEPER INTO OUR INVESTIGATIONS INTO MICHIGAN FRAUD
Welcome to the Machine: The New Michigan Medicaid Fraud Machine
Piles of Garbage, Empty Buildings: Something Stinks in Michigan
The Fraud Goes National: They Can’t Even Flip Burgers
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