Yesterday with Secretary Kennedy, I zeroed in on one of the ugliest fraud magnets in Medicaid. In New York, a program meant to care for the vulnerable has been twisted into a fraud-soaked jobs scheme, with roughly 250,000 enrollees, about 400,000 caregivers, and spending that exploded from $2.5 billion in 2019 to an estimated $12 billion in 2025. If New York’s Medicaid spending matched the national average, the savings would be almost $43 billion. That is why I introduced the Combating Deceptive Practices in Assistance Programs Act of 2026 to put real guardrails back in place.
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Identity theft is the “foundational” fraud upon which many other crimes are built. It involves the unauthorized acquisition and use of a person’s personal identifying information (PII), such as an ID number, Social Security number, or passport details.
- How it works: Fraudsters obtain PII through data breaches, mail theft, or “social engineering” (tricking people into revealing details). Once they have this data, they can open new bank accounts, apply for credit cards or loans, and even receive medical treatment under your name.
- Synthetic Identity Fraud: A sophisticated variation where criminals combine real and fabricated information to create a completely new, “synthetic” person. This is particularly difficult to detect because there is no single victim to report the suspicious activity initially.