Tag: insurance

ICE Proposes Insurance Coverage For Local Officers Involved In Immigration Arrests

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has proposed an insurance plan to shield local police officers involved in immigration arrests from financial liability if they face allegations of misconduct during those arrests.

A proposal document published Aug. 14 by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) shows the agency intends to pay for liability insurance coverage for state and local law enforcement officers who are trained to perform immigration officer functions.

The plan would allow officers to purchase up to $500,000 in professional liability insurance, which typically covers financial losses, legal defense fees, settlements, and judgments. Officers would be reimbursed up to $250 each year for insurance costs, according to the document.

The proposal also states that ICE intends to hire a contractor to provide outreach, training, and support to its 287(g) partners. The contractor would also be tasked with coordinating professional liability insurance coverage and reimbursement for law enforcement officers, according to the document.

The 287(g) program is a federal partnership that allows ICE to delegate authority to state and local law enforcement officers to perform specified immigration officer functions, including identifying and processing removable illegal immigrants who have criminal charges.

ICE is seeking industry feedback on the proposal by Aug. 20, according to the DHS’s notice.

The proposal comes as the Trump administration has intensified its immigration enforcement efforts nationwide, with ICE playing a major role.

A notice published on Aug. 10 by DHS showed that ICE also planned to provide its agents new gloves, known as CTG-5 G.L.O.V.E, or Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter, which can deliver electric shocks.

A DHS spokesperson told The Epoch Times by email on Aug. 12 that ICE aims to ensure that its officers have the tools and equipment they need to safely arrest and remove “criminal illegal aliens” from the country.

“Every decision is made with careful consideration and appropriately reviewed to ensure that any technology ICE utilizes is consistent with all applicable law enforcement policies and standards,” the spokesperson said.

“Our officers are highly trained in de-escalation tactics and regularly receive ongoing use of force training.”

The Democratic National Committee’s Resolutions Committee on Aug. 13 approved a resolution that calls for the abolition of ICE. The resolution cited the deaths of ICE detainees and allegations of poor conditions at detention facilities.

Natalie Baldassarre, the national press secretary for the Republican National Committee, criticized the resolution, saying that Democrats should prioritize the safety of Americans. Baldassarre also said the Trump administration’s enforcement efforts have mostly targeted illegal immigrants accused or convicted of crimes.

Keep reading

Mark Walter Probe Puts Wall Street’s Insurance-Private Credit Machine Under DoJ Scrutiny

An ongoing federal investigation into billionaire Mark Walter’s business empire is raising alarm bells about Wall Street’s use of insurance capital to finance private credit and other illiquid investments. 

Bloomberg reported that Walter’s TWG Global holding company said in a filing that it will wind down its exposure to affiliated businesses by up to $6.5 billion after the transactions drew scrutiny from federal investigators. This comes after the Department of Justice homed in on loans that should’ve been marked as affiliated transactions. 

Walter’s TWG Global holding company will buy up to $6.5 billion of affiliated assets from Delaware Life Insurance Co. in exchange for an equal amount of unaffiliated investments. Clear Spring Life and Annuity Co., another TWG-controlled insurer, separately reduced related-party transactions by $90 million.

The moves begin unwinding more than $20 billion of loans and investments that the insurers acknowledged should have been classified as affiliated transactions. 

“Tripping over these requirements can constitute fraud,” said Derek Reisfield, co-founder and former chairman of MarketWatch, as well as a former McKinsey consultant, who was quoted by The New York Post. 

Reisfield said that heavy exposure to businesses connected to an insurer’s owner poses a very high risk. 

“The risk is that concentrated loans to related parties go south, and the insurance companies and their policyholders can’t be made whole,” Reisfield said, adding, “It’s bad risk management and leaves the companies vulnerable.”

Last week, Walter agreed to sell the Los Angeles Lakers to Josh Kushner and Bob Iger at a record $12.5 billion valuation, and earlier this week, a report stated that he is mulling over selling his stake in Chelsea Football Club to the majority owner, Clearlake Capital. 

Insurance companies are allowed to do business with related parties, but such dealings must be disclosed and properly labeled to ensure that owners do not put their interests ahead of those of policyholders. 

The investigation into Walter’s empire is a major wake-up call about Wall Street’s use of insurance capital to finance private credit and other illiquid investments. 

Walter was one of the earliest adopters of the strategy of acquiring insurers and investing their long-term policyholder capital in higher-yielding private assets. A number of other asset managers, including Apollo, KKR, and Brookfield, have followed suit by building out insurance operations. Private-capital firms now manage more than $1 trillion of insurance assets.

“We have always acted in good faith, and insinuations that we have in any way attempted to circumvent our obligations are simply false,” a TWG spokesman told The Wall Street Journal. 

More problems: Walter, CEO of Guggenheim Partners, saw a financing entity tied to the investment firm report a sharp decline in second-quarter earnings, driven by the delayed recognition of advisory fees. The disclosure sent the entity’s term loan tumbling below 80 cents on the dollar.

To sum up, the affiliated transactions were not inherently illegal, provided they had regulatory approval. That appears to be where the process broke down in Walter’s case.

Keep reading

Why The Trump Administration Was Right To End The Medicare Part D Insurer Bailout

he Trump administration’s recent decision to end a temporary Part D subsidy program in 2027 attracted much press attention, and some criticism. The California Democratic Party claimed on  X that “25 million people, mainly seniors, count on Medicare Part D to afford their prescriptions. Donald Trump is putting their health on the line by ending the program.”

This is  absurd—and false. The Trump administration is not  ending the Part D program (established by Congress in 2003) and couldn’t do so even if it wanted to. However, it is ending a temporary and extralegal bailout program that provided billions of dollars in subsidies to insurers. That’s because Democrats made changes to the program that have cost far more than they claimed.

The Bailout, Explained

In summer 2024, the Biden administration announced a unilateral  “premium stabilization demonstration.” The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) noted the new program would start at the2025 plan year. This was just in time for premium announcements to land in seniors’ mailboxes just prior to the November 2024 election.

The program came into effect largely due to Democrats’ Inflation (Reduction) Act. That law shifted and restructured costs Part D insurers had to pay. It also reduced seniors’ out-of-pocket expenses on prescription drugs. The latter change will, all else equal, result in higher spending, because seniors will consume more and more costly drugs if they  have to pay for fewer or none of their own costs.

The IRA already included one “stabilization” mechanism in a statute running through 2029, intending to minimize any premium increases. But, after seeing preliminary plan bids for 2025, CMS effectively admitted this lone bailout would be insufficient to prevent large spikes in premiums or insurer exits. 

So it conjured a second, unilateral bailout to minimize any potential disruptions. Of course, as I noted at the time, this also amounted to using taxpayer funds to prevent Kamala Harris from suffering a big political controversy in the days leading up to the presidential election.

Unsustainable Costs

As the Washington Post wrote in a recent editorial, these “subsidies have helped keep premiums down but simply by shifting more of the cost on to the federal government,” rather than lowering costs. Indeed, while seniors traditionally paid 25.5 percent  of Part D benefit costs via premiums, this year seniors are paying only about half that amount, or 13 percent.  Taxpayers foot the bill for roughly seven in eight dollars of program spending (87 percent).

The IRA bailouts resulted in $40 billion in additional taxpayer spending in 2025 and 2026, and the costs will add up even more in coming years. I noted recently that this year’s Medicare trustees report increased the long-term cost of the Part D program by roughly one-third, or $5 trillion, compared to the 2025 trustees report.

Justifiable Action

Given these skyrocketing costs, it makes perfect sense to end the Biden administration’s unilateral bailout. Because the IRA’s major changes took effect in January 2025, insurers now have enough actuarial information (i.e., plan claims) to price their products without uncertainty leading to major variations in premiums. 

Eliminating one bailout—remember, the statutory bailout remains in effect through 2029—may increase Part D premiums slightly. But CMS noted that the majority of enrollees will either face no change or a decline in premiums (25 percent), or an increase of under $10 per month (30 percent). Given that taxpayers will still pay a greater share of Part D costs than before the IRA and premiums have fallen by more than one-third in inflation-adjusted terms over the past 15 years, Part D still represents a good value for seniors.

By ending the Biden administration’s unilateral insurer bailout, the Trump administration served as a smart steward of scarce taxpayer dollars, while restoring more of a competitive balance to Part D. False scaremongering by the left aside, the action will help to preserve a Medicare program that faces significant solvency concerns.

Keep reading

A Million Obamacare Users Enrolled Without a Social Security Number

Obamacare is expensive, unconstitutional, socialist, and bloated. It is also — surprise, surprise — riddled with fraud.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Mehmet Oz revealed the stunning number of Obamacare users who never provided a Social Security number, raising serious questions about the scope of fraud in the government healthcare insurance program.

In a Saturday video, Kennedy and Oz updated the American people on efforts to uncover and root out fraud. The HHS secretary began, “The Obamacare marketplace is plagued by fraud, in large part because the Biden administration dismantled basic program integrity guardrails. [And] partisan lawfare blocked common sense efforts to protect taxpayers. Today, Dr. Oz and I are exposing one of the latest examples of fraud that we’ve uncovered — more than a million people enrolled in Obamacare without Social Security numbers on file. That is a glaring warning side of fraud. If even a single person was on Obamacare with no Social Security number, we should have found out. Why are we paying people we don’t know if they actually exist?” Why indeed. Probably because Democrats love to redistribute money no matter how many criminals benefit.

Oz picked up the thread of the explanation. “Shady insurance agents and other bad actors have been getting paid to enroll unsuspecting Americans in health plans they never signed up for,” he exclaimed. “These rogue agents have been flooding into healthcare.gov. That’s the Obamacare marketplace. They submit applications for fake people, enroll stolen identities, all to collect millions of dollars, improper fees, from insurance companies for selling plans they never legitimately sold. Some of these agents refuse to follow basic rules like providing their clients’ Social Security number. That, my friends, is a huge red flag.”

Under the current administration, HHS and CMS are actually paying attention to red flags. As Kennedy said, “These fraudsters deliberately pick plans with no premiums. No premiums means no bill. No bill means most people never know that they’ve been enrolled in a plan that you and I are paying for with our taxpayer dollars. The only people who benefit are the fraudsters.”

But the current administration has a zero tolerance attitude toward fraud, Oz emphasized. “So here’s what we’re doing about it,” he said. “In May, we took swift action to block this fraudulent behavior directly on healthcare.gov and to our marketplace Call Center. If an agent wants to be paid, [he] must follow the rules. No ifs, ands or buts. They are gonna have to provide government-verified information for their clients to be enrolled.”

This effort is bearing fruit, Kennedy stated. “Thanks to this aggressive enforcement strategy, we’ve already eliminated thousands of fraudulent policies, and we’re just getting started. We’re also working with insurers to cancel every policy that should never have been issued and recover every taxpayer dollar that was fraudulently paid out,” he assured Americans.

Oz agreed, “We’re also scaling up our enforcement efforts to prevent these bad actors from finding new ways to manipulate the system ahead of the open enrollment system this fall, because we know that bad actors don’t simply stop when you cut off one vulnerable area. The Biden administration let healthcare fraudsters run wild. Thanks to President Trump, those days are over.” The battle is ongoing, but there have already been victories.

Kennedy warned, “To every unscrupulous insurance agent and fraudster exploiting the American people, here is our message. If you steal from the American taxpayer, or if you defraud American families, HHS will find you, and we will hold you accountable.” Oz chimed in, “If you’re a fraudster, here’s our advice to you. Do not walk away from us, run, because we are gonna find you.”

Secretary Kennedy stated that his priority is protecting Americans’ health and Americans’ money, now and always.

Keep reading

Obamacare Fraud Estimated To Cost $25 Billion This Year: Report

Taxpayers will foot the bill for up to $25 billion in improper Obamacare payments due to organized fraud and improper enrollments in 2026, according to a June 3 report from Paragon Health Institute.

Some 6.2 million enrollments in the healthcare exchanges during the most recent open-enrollment period were improper, the report said, accounting for 27 percent of all enrollments.

The conservative think tank has studied fraud in the Obamacare program since 2024.

The problem of improper enrollments persists despite recent attempts to curtail it, and appears to involve organized efforts by unscrupulous insurance brokers, the report concluded.

Meanwhile, some industry groups have criticized the findings.

Incentives For Fraud

Obamacare’s premium subsidies, which cover 100 percent of the health coverage policy for many beneficiaries, and referral bonuses offer an incentive for both enrollees and brokers to abuse the system, the report concluded.

Researchers identified improper enrollments by comparing Obamacare data to Census Bureau population estimates. The improper enrollments were calculated by a state-by-state comparison of enrollments in the lowest income category to the number of people having that income level in the state.

The lowest income category is 100 percent to 150 percent of the federal poverty level, or about $16,000 to $24,000 per year for an individual or about $27,000 to $41,000 for a family of three.

Enrollees with incomes at that level receive the highest subsidies. During the 2026 open enrollment period, 29 percent of enrollees chose a plan with a $0 premium.

That gives enrollees and the agents who sign people up for Obamacare an incentive to misstate their income, the report concluded.

The American Hospital Association has said Paragon’s research results are not valid due to flawed methodology. “The Census uses different income and household size definitions than the Marketplace so there is no possibility of the data matching,” the group said in an August 2025 statement. The association also said the Census relies on reported income but Obamacare asks for projected income.

The total value of Obamacare subsidies to be paid in 2026 is $88 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Agents who enroll individuals or families in Obamacare earn a commission averaging around $20 per enrollee per month for as long as the policy is active.

Obamacare received more than 23 million enrollments during the 2026 open enrollment period.

Keep reading

Massachusetts Sues UnitedHealthcare Over Alleged $100 Million Fraud

Massachusetts sued UnitedHealthcare on May 29, alleging the company defrauded the state’s Medicaid program by making seniors appear sicker than they were to secure higher payments.

The company contracted with MassHealth to provide a Senior Care Options—which combines Medicare and Medicaid benefits into one plan—for seniors aged 65 and older.

UnitedHealthcare allegedly received more than $100 million in fraudulent payments from MassHealth between 2015 and 2025, Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell stated in the complaint.

UnitedHealthcare, a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group, said the complaint is “meritless and doesn’t accurately describe our Senior Care Options program” in ‌a statement emailed to The Epoch Times.

The legal complaint alleged UnitedHealthcare inflated payment rates in three ways.

Upcoding

Massachusetts paid UnitedHealthcare a per-member, per-month rate for each senior enrolled in the plan based on UnitedHealthcare’s assessments of the member’s health conditions.

UnitedHealthcare allegedly labeled members as having behavioral health disorders such as depression or anxiety, or substance use disorders to gain higher reimbursement rates, according to the complaint, when the members had no diagnosis or treatment on record for such conditions.

An analysis by the attorney general’s office revealed that nearly 30 percent of UnitedHealthcare’s 2014 through 2024 behavioral health assessments lacked any matching medical claims to support the mental health diagnoses reported to the state.

Keeping Overpayments

The insurer’s internal reviews identified that many members were incorrectly placed in the highest and most expensive level of care despite not qualifying for it, according to the lawsuit.

While the company eventually downgraded these members to lower-paying levels, it allegedly failed to inform the state of the prior errors or return the extra money it had already collected.

Keep reading

Americans Who Can Are Dropping Medical Insurance

Have you observed what is happening with medical insurance in the United States? There is an upheaval taking place. You might be experiencing it yourself.

The Wakely Consulting Group has taken upon itself to track trends in the medical insurance market, both pricing and participation.

Their latest report has documented an ongoing and profound shift, one so dramatic that it portends something truly meaningful for the future.

Lacking serious reform of the system from Congress, it seems that consumers are taking matters into their own hands.

Congress declined to extend subsidies for the Affordable Care Act (ACA) starting in January. Consumers have examined their bills and plans in light of the price increases which range from 25 to 115 percent depending on conditions and levels. More than a million people have dropped their coverage entirely. More will do so through the end of the year.

Wakely comments: “Based on unique data collection from 80 percent of the ACA individual market, Wakely … estimates a material reduction in enrollment for 2026, ranging on average from 17 percent to 26 percent in total.”

This is happening because, fortunately, there is no individual mandate to be enrolled in anything since the Supreme Court deleted that portion of the program.

Individuals are downgrading their coverage to plans with fewer benefits and higher deductibles. Or they are just doing without and paying cash or shopping for crowdhealth options.

The implications for the ACA, also known as Obamacare, are profound.

First, this changes the risk pool calculation in ways that are disruptive. The whole machinery fundamentally depends on large risk pools that mask costs and separate premiums from actual individual circumstance. With such large pools, the architects hoped to take a sideways route to a privatized form of socialized medicine.

That scheme now lies in tatters.

Second, with so many people leaving (obviously those who don’t anticipate system needs) those who remain in the system are less healthy: the very people more willing to pay the higher premiums are those who expect to use the services. From an actuarial point of view, this change puts further pressure on prices. And with risk pools shrinking and data pointing to higher costs, we have a system that seems to be eating itself on both ends.

You would think that the implosion of the medical-care system of the world’s biggest economy would be big news. Somehow it is not. Why has this not been widely reported?

A theory as to why: It is happening too slowly and with too much data diffusion. It is genuinely difficult to get a handle on the pace of the increases because every state is different, every age group is priced differently, and the diversity of real-world experience not only differs on the household level but even on the event level.

Which is to say, you never know until it hits you precisely what you will pay given any particular medical-care event. As for the premiums and deductibles, people are remarkably unwilling to share personal stories of what they face due to privacy concerns and also some element of personal shame related to financial burdens.

The system as it stands is so enormously complicated that hardly anyone can really understand the whole, much less characterize the aggregate experience with the sector. It keeps growing larger, more expensive, and more exploitative, but also more complicated and diffuse, leaving writers like me ever less willing to make a judgment on it.

Keep reading

UnitedHealthcare Learns You Can’t Fix Stupid, Fires Social Media Manager Over Trump Post

When my kids were very young, one of the first words that we banned was “stupid.” No one is stupid, I would tell them; some people just don’t think things through. Well, to borrow from that explanation, I probably didn’t think that all the way through.

While I don’t regret teaching the kids not to use “the S word,” as we used to call it, the older I’ve gotten, I’ve had to face the reality that, yes, some people who otherwise are of sound mind are just stupid. Nowhere is this more evident than on social media. The latest example is a social media manager, of all things, who used to work for UnitedHealthcare. That was until the brass at her employer saw this post of hers, where she gave her take on the most recent assassination attempt on the President of the United States.

Keep in mind, this is a person who gets paid to work as a “professional” in social media, and she’s lacking the good judgment to know you shouldn’t go online to wish harm to someone who’s now had three assassination attempts on his life, and the Secret Service and the FBI both report up to him. Now, that’s stupid. There is no other way to say it.

This dunce’s name is Alison King, and according to Fox News, she was “identified as a social media manager for UnitedHealthcare.” Apparently, she was fired for making a TikTok video where she expressed regret that the president survived this latest attempt on his life, when a shooter targeted President Donald Trump and his administration at the recent White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) dinner.

In the video, King says, “We’re cooked as a country when my first reaction to hearing the news about Trump’s (with a hand motion of a slit throat) attempt was, ‘It was probably fake’…Like, immediately I was like, ‘Oh, that wasn’t real, probably fake.’” She then added sarcastically, “And the second was ‘Aww, they missed? So happy they missed.’ Yeah, that’s sad.’”

Fox News Digital reported that a spokesperson for UnitedHealthcare responded to inquiries about King’s post, saying, “Violence is never acceptable and any comments that suggest otherwise are in no way consistent with our mission and values. The person who made comments online about Saturday night’s incident at a Washington event where President Trump and many other political leaders were gathered is no longer employed by the company.”

Keep in mind, this is a company that on Dec. 4, 2024, lost its own CEO to a successful assassination attempt. That was when Luigi Mangione allegedly pulled a gun and ambushed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson at point-blank range just outside a hotel where Thompson was to attend a business meeting.

You’d think that a social media manager who worked for that company would know that things like assassination attempts, and online chatter about them, are taken quite seriously by the government, by lawyers, by law enforcement agencies —and, oh, by the way, by your own dang employer.

Do you think she might have learned her lesson? You be the judge. 

Keep reading

One in Five California Home Sales Canceled Due to Unaffordable Insurance

Glenn and Lorraine Crawford paid about $500 a month to insure their home in Agoura Hills northwest of Los Angeles when they bought it in 2012.

The Crawfords say they have little alternative but to pay the bill that arrived last month, which, at more than $44,000 a year, is almost as much as their mortgage bill. The only other insurer willing to cover their home, Lloyd’s of London, quoted them $80,000 a year.

More than a year after infernos tore through Los Angeles County, millions of Californians like the Crawfords are suffering through a home-insurance crisis that has rolled on for years with eye-watering rate increases, canceled policies and rejected claims.

Two of the biggest insurers, State Farm and Allstate, aren’t selling to new customers in the state, despite getting double-digit rate increases approved for their existing policyholders. A third, Farmers Insurance, has committed to cover more homes in fire-prone areas, but only a fraction compared with the drop in its overall number of policies since the crisis began.

The insurance dysfunction has spread to California’s housing market, the country’s biggest and most expensive, with nearly one-in-five real-estate agents reporting a canceled sale last year because of clients unable to find affordable insurance, according to a survey by the trade body California Association of Realtors.

The roots of California’s insurance crisis go back years. The state’s tough rate caps kept premiums low. But home insurers eventually balked, saying they couldn’t charge enough to cover rising wildfire and other losses, made worse by climate change and development. Insurers didn’t renew tens of thousands of policies, especially in fire-prone areas.

California’s uphill battle to draw insurers back could prove a template—or cautionary tale—for other disaster-prone states. New rules implemented last year, for instance, require home-insurers in the state to pledge to sell new policies in high-risk wildfire zones, in return for allowing them to charge higher rates.

As part of a request for a 6.99% rate increase, Farmers, the second-biggest home-insurer in the state, pledged to add at least 5,596 policies in high-risk areas by September 2028. That is less than a 10th of the 59,806 reduction in Farmers’ total number of California home-insurance policies in the previous two years, according to a Consumer Watchdog analysis.

Others continue to shun the state despite winning big concessions. California regulators approved a 34% rate increase for Allstate in 2024. Yet it has no “growth aspirations” in California home insurance, Chief Executive Tom Wilson said last year, adding that it would take time to fix the market. A spokesman said that remains Allstate’s position.

Keep reading

Former Obama Adviser David Axelrod Gets Absolutely RIPPED on Social Media for Complaining About Rising Cost of Obamacare

David Axelrod, the Chicago Machine Democrat considered the ‘architect’ of Obama’s 2008 presidential run, recently complained on Twitter/X about the rising cost of healthcare premiums under the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare as it’s widely known.

Other Twitter/X users ripped into Axelrod, pointing out his involvement in this issue.

This has become a running theme among Democrats who desperately want the country to forget that Democrats passed Obamacare on an entirely party-line vote while they controlled everything in Washington during Obama’s first term.

Keep reading