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Meet Gov. Kathy Hochul, fraud warrior — and try to keep a straight face.
On Tuesday, Hochul went before the cameras to boast that she’s driving down costs by cracking down on auto-insurance fraud . . . even as vastly more fraud flourishes across the state, enabled above all by Albany’s culture of corruption.
Consider: Her big brag was the arrest the arrest of 16 fraudsters for intentionally causing crashes and filing $500,000 in phony insurance claims.
That same day, the feds were raiding adult day cares in Brooklyn, part of a massive probe of more than 100 sites suspected of Medicaid fraud that likely runs into the hundreds of millions in theft, part of billions scammed from state taxpayers.
New York shells out $116 billion a year on Medicaid, but the powers-that-be show no desire to ensure it’s spent well: State Attorney General Tish James, in particular, runs a Medicaid Fraud Control Unit that ranks worst in the nation for effectiveness.
Then again, the Hochul-appointed Office of the Medicaid Inspector General doesn’t do much, either.
Federal lawmakers also fault New York for not even judging the fraud-risk levels of its providers.
OK: Hochul this year did push some small auto-insurance reforms through the Legislature, and nabbing 16 perps is another step in the right direction.
Yet even she admits New York car insurance is a national “outlier” — with yearly premiums here averaging $1,500 above the US average, so there’s long way to go.
And overall fraud, waste and abuse in New York has exploded during Hochul’s five years in office, with Medicaid scams only the outrage that’s hitting the news now (thanks to the feds, not the state).
Hochul’s larger drive to lower costs in general is also a sad joke: Since taking office she’s repeatedly raised taxes and OK’d endless laws and regulations that only push costs up.
Her insane green agenda alone has pushed energy bills to the stratosphere — notwithstanding her “generous” rebates of $100 or $200 that don’t come close to offsetting the higher costs.
Notably, New Yorkers know Albany is ripping them off; that’s why Republican gov challenger Bruce Blakeman is closing in the polls despite the huge war chest Hochul built up with expert exploitation of Albany’s pay-to-play system.
That she’s completely a creature of that system is why her fraud-warrior pose is such a joke.