00:00We're announcing today that we have decided to temporarily halt certain amounts of Medicaid
00:07funding that are going to the state of Minnesota in order to ensure that the state of Minnesota
00:13takes its obligations seriously to be good stewards of the American people's tax money.
00:19Now, what is this going to mean? What this means is that, first of all, the providers on the ground
00:24in Minnesota have actually already been paid. The state has paid those providers the money.
00:29What we're doing is we are stopping the federal payments that will go to the state government
00:34until the state government takes its obligations seriously to stop the fraud that's being
00:41perpetrated against the American taxpayer. There are a few different ways that we're doing that.
00:46There are a few different affirmative actions that we're taking today. Dr. Oz is going to talk about
00:51those, but let me talk a little bit about the spirit of this and why we're doing it.
00:56So number one, one of the examples of fraud that we've seen in Minnesota that we verify that is
01:02just awful is that a program that existed to ensure that autistic children had access to some
01:08after-school services has made a number of people rich, not by providing services to needy children,
01:15but by allowing fraudsters to take money that ought by right go to American citizens and to American
01:22families and to set up sham businesses, set up sham clients, set up people who are not even autistic,
01:29but claim to be autistic in order that they benefit from the money that's out there. Now,
01:34what does that mean? Number one, it means that a lot of people are getting rich off the generosity
01:39of American taxpayers, but more fundamentally and more importantly than that, it means that there are
01:44kids in Minnesota who deserve these services, who need these services, and they're not going to those
01:50kids. They're going to fraudsters in Minneapolis. That is unacceptable and that's the sort of thing that
01:56we're cutting off with this action today. Let me make one final point about the spirit of this. You
02:01know, one of the things I love about our country is that we're a generous country. We're a generous
02:05people. We take care of our fellow citizens who can't afford medical care because they're down on
02:11their luck. We take care of people who can't afford to put food on the table even though they work
02:16hard
02:16and play by the rules. We recognize that we're all in this together and part of the reason why we
02:21have
02:22Medicaid or part of the reason why we have food stamps, part of the reason why we have these programs
02:27is we want to make sure that kids who grew up in families, not all that different from the family
02:31that
02:31I grew up in, that they have access to the basic necessities, food, medical care, after-school
02:37services when their family needs them but they're unable to pay. What's happening in Minneapolis, in
02:44California, in a number of states all across our country is that the generosity and the good hearts
02:51of our fellow Americans are being taken advantage of. We're taking that social contract that says that
02:57our American citizens we take care of one another and we're allowing a few bad actors to get rich
03:04off that generosity of spirit instead of providing the services to the kids who need it. This is
03:09disgraceful. It has happened for too long. Far too many people have gotten rich by taking what is the best
03:17of the American spirit and getting rich off of it instead of providing services to kids who need it.
03:22That is stopping today.
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