Attorney General Eric Holder

Attorney General Eric Holder

WASHINGTON — A federal strike force has charged 91 people, including a hospital president, doctors and nurses, with Medicare fraud schemes in seven cities involving $429 million in false billings. [...] Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said that that in addition to the newly announced criminal charges, her agency used new authority under the Obama administration's health care law to stop future payments to many of the health care providers suspected of fraud.

Here's a big win for Eric Holder, Kathleen Sebelius and President Obama. It's also evidence of how this administration really is protecting Medicare Those charged include the president of a hospital in Houston along with six others who racked up $158 million in fraudulent billings, two doctors and two nurses in Dallas who for $103 million in fraudulent billings, and a doctor and four chiropractors in Brooklyn, who participated in a scheme netting $23 million. The other cases are in Baton Rouge, Chicago, Los Angeles and Miami. The charges include "billing the government for unnecessary ambulance rides in California, writing prescriptions for patients in Dallas who did not qualify for them and paying kickbacks like food and cigarettes to patients in Houston if they attended programs for which a hospital could bill."

When politicians talk about waste, fraud and abuse, this is what they're talking about. And the Obama administration is actually doing something about it, cracking down on the fraud, but using Obamacare to prevent providers caught in fraud from ever gaming the system again.