Facts Matter

The Department of Justice released a statement, announcing the conviction of a man at the center of a billion-dollar Medicaid fraud scheme.

Brett Blackman, the CEO and owner of software company HealthSplash was convicted in federal court for his part in the sprawling fraud scheme. The scheme involved using foreign telemarketers to aggressively call elderly Americans, get their medicaid beneficiary numbers, push medical devices onto them that they did not really need, then generate fraudulent doctors' orders for those devices.

He would then pass on the scripts in return for illegal kickbacks to both suppliers and pharmacies involved in the scam, who would then bill Medicare for these prescriptions.

In total, Blackman, alongside his co-conspirators, billed Medicare over $1 billion and were reimbursed roughly $450 million.

Let’s go through the details together.

It's been a long time coming: the IRS recently launched a pilot program using Palantir AI-technology to help it figure out who most needs to be audited.

This means that, as fun as it was to pay taxes already—and then have a federal bureaucrat decide whether you deserve an audit or not—moving forward, the decision will be heavily influenced by an AI machine.

Let's go through the details together.

Just earlier this week, the mayor of Arcadia (in Northeast Los Angeles) agreed to plead guilty to illegally acting as an agent of China.

She was the mayor of an American city, while actually being an out-and-out agent for the Chinese Communist Party—even going so far as calling a Chinese official her “leader.”

Let’s go through the details of her case together.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Just as the hantavirus situation was resolved aboard the MV Hondius, another cruise liner was hit with a massive viral outbreak. The silver lining here, though, is that the virus in question isn’t as bad as hantavirus, which has a mortality rate of 30–50 percent.

The new ship, according to the CDC, had an outbreak of the norovirus, with 115 people falling ill already.
Let’s go through the details.

The U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Louisiana v. Callais could be one of—if not the—deciding factor in who controls the House moving forward.

The ruling is monumental because it struck down an interpretation of the Voting Rights Act that has, for decades now, forced southern states to draw up congressional maps in a way that maximizes the black vote.

If you look at the congressional map, districts in these states have been drawn in strange ways because they’ve been forced by the courts to connect disparate pockets of black neighborhoods.

However, this has just been ruled to be unconstitutional, and the states in question—many of whom actually have Republican state legislatures—are now free for the first time in decades to redraw their congressional maps without concern for the racial makeup of the people living there.

The reason this truly matters is that the black vote is overwhelmingly Democratic-leaning. Meaning, the districts in question, the ones that are likely to get redrawn, could be flipped from blue-leaning to red-leaning.

Let’s unpack this story in three steps: the legal framework that was in place for the past several decades, the Supreme Court’s new ruling, and then what this means moving forward—including which specific districts are likely to get amended.