‘A Little Ironic’: Vance Calls Out Democrats Over Medicare Fraud

Vice President JD Vance, head of the White House Fraud Task Force, called out congressional Democrats on Tuesday for consistently criticizing health care costs without ever addressing the fraud that his task force is targeting.

Vance’s task force has found hundreds of billions of dollars in fraud, with millions stemming from health care.

“I always find it a little ironic when congressional Democrats, who say that they care a lot about Medicare, Medicare, [and the] working people who benefit these programs, don’t do anything to try to cut down on the fraud,” the vice president told Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, during a fireside chat at the Make America Healthy Again Summit.

The all-day summit, held at the Waldorf Astoria in Washington, D.C., brought together hundreds of health professionals and MAHA supporters. Speakers included administration officials, health care CEOs, election candidates, and even representatives from artificial intelligence companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI.

The speakers covered topics ranging from Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services reform, longevity, democratizing health care, and the role of AI in the nation’s health.

Vance and Kennedy closed out the night as the keynote speakers.

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“We have found close to $250 billion in fraud just since I’ve been leading the task force,” Vance said. “One of the things that is genuinely shocking to me about this work is how many programs we have, that are meant to be generous to our fellow Americans, have no real eligibility criteria.”

Vance called it “basic” and “common sense” that a person would “have to be an American citizen to benefit from a Medicare program.”

“We don’t want to give health care to literally everybody, including people who’ve been here in the country illegally,” he added. “And yet, because we don’t check eligibility sufficiently, we give it—billions and billions of dollars to people receiving benefits.”

Vance told Kennedy he believes public trust must be restored to these services and that it’s their job to ensure that trust.

“I don’t want Americans to think that when they pay their money to the IRS, they give it to a fraudster. I want them to know what purposes they pay their taxes for,” he said.

“Secondly, it is very important that we discourage people from taking advantage of stuff to begin with. And the only way to do that is to prosecute people, take back the money that they stole, and to make sure that if you defraud the American taxpayer, you go to prison.”