The blame for alleged fraud in Minnesota belongs to conservatives
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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HCA Healthcare
13 min read
The article mentions Rick Scott overseeing a hospital chain that defrauded Medicare/Medicaid of $1.7 billion - this was Columbia/HCA, which paid the largest healthcare fraud settlement in US history at the time, providing crucial context for the article's point about selective fraud prosecution
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Somali diaspora
13 min read
Understanding the history of Somali immigration to Minnesota - which has the largest Somali population in the US - provides essential context for why this community is being targeted and the broader pattern of anti-immigrant sentiment the article describes
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The internet is currently awash in right-wing propaganda about alleged fraud in Minnesota’s social services programs.
Unsurprisingly, you can thank a mendacious right-wing influencer for kicking off this hysteria. Also unsurprisingly, the Trump administration is making the most of this opportunity to kick a blue state in the teeth.
Nick Shirley, a 23-year-old conservative YouTuber who specializes in anti-immigrant videos, went to multiple daycare facilities in Minnesota — but only ones run by Somali folks, of course — and filmed himself “investigating.” He alleged that several were essentially non-operational and were instead fronts for fraud and siphoning Child Care Assistance Program funds.
This video then became the basis for the Trump administration to freeze Small Business Administration funding, taking $5.5 million away from Minnesota’s small business development centers, women’s business centers, a microloan program, and more.
You might be confused about how this relates to daycare facilities, but don’t worry — the administration is directly attacking those too.
On Tuesday, the government froze all childcare funds to Minnesota, a move that leaves 30,000 lower-income families without childcare assistance, which functionally means that many of those families will not be able to access childcare at all.
The administration is taking these actions even though it took less than a week for the wheels to come off and for Shirley’s video to be largely debunked. Even CBS News, which these days is known more for protecting the administration rather than ever criticizing it, found that of the 12 centers, 10 had active licenses.
Two facilities Shirley targeted for his big fraud reveal had already shut down earlier this year, which would make doing a bunch of fraud sort of hard.
KSTP — the ABC affiliate in Minnesota that is so right-wing that it once pushed the story that the then-Minneapolis mayor, Betsy Hodges, was flashing a gang sign when she was merely pointing at someone — also did some actual investigating. They found the same thing CBS did — all but two of the facilities have active licenses and all were visited this year. KSTP’s review of state records found that the centers had been cited for safety violations,
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