California’s welfare machine is bleeding billions a year. And, as we recently reported, few programs are more troubled than the state’s $30 billion, Medi-Cal backed In-Home Supportive Services Program.
IHSS has become one of the nation’s largest fraud magnets, losing as much as $12 billion to scam artists every year. The program sounds compassionate: pay people to care for their disabled and elderly family members at home, rather than warehousing them in facilities. But the system’s design created perverse incentives that all but guarantee corruption.
A growing cadre of whistleblowers has confirmed what the numbers suggest: IHSS is not merely plagued by accidental waste but has become a way for criminals to get rich quick.
The latest of these is a former California law-enforcement official who has worked on Medi-Cal fraud cases. Our source has seen IHSS fraud happen on an industrial scale: homes run by “overlords” who stuff them with sickly Californians, cut off from their families, to pocket the state’s money.
Yet the state doesn’t care. Fraud routinely goes unpunished, as California judges downgrade felony charges and let sympathetic offenders off with community service; meantime, IHSS can’t seem to recover a single stolen dollar.
This interview, conducted on the condition of anonymity, has been edited for length, clarity, and to preserve anonymizing details.
City Journal: How widespread is IHSS and Medi-Cal fraud?
Source: It’s been around forever. This kind of fraud has been happening for decades in California. The problem is that, even when we press charges, judges just plea cases down because they consider them insignificant.
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