’Bamcare scams boomed under Biden, putrid pols normalize violence and other commentary

Fraud beat: ’Bamcare Scams Boomed Under Biden

Medicaid fraud has “dominated headlines,” but Obamacare has also long been “highly susceptible” to fraud, fume the Washington Examiner’s editors — and it “exploded” thanks to President Joe Biden’s added COVID subsidies. Team Trump has moved to curb the scamming, “but a new report from Paragon Health Institute shows” ’Bamcare fraud is “persistent and more should be done.” Driving the scams are brokers who enroll “real people” in 100%-subsidized plans, people who never know their names were used. “Taxpayer dollars then go directly to health insurance companies,” with brokers getting “$20 to $30 per enrollee per month.” Though the Biden subsidies have “thankfully” expired, “automatic enrollment means millions of fraudulent accounts” still operate.

Disorder watch: Putrid Pols Normalize Violence

“Five people were hospitalized after a seriously mentally ill suspect” with a “criminal record” went on a “slashing spree at Penn Station” Sunday, “exactly one month” after another “mentally ill repeat offender” killed a man “hours after being released from a hospital psych evaluation,” notes City Journal’s Carolyn D. Gorman. “Violence linked to untreated serious mental illness” has “become increasingly normalized in New York,” letting “city leaders escape accountability for their failure to address the situation.” Electeds routinely “normalize violence by downplaying concern,” calling transit violence “rare” when it’s at historic highs. “Reducing” violence by the mentally ill “is not impossible,” but “stern faces and shaking heads” won’t do a thing.

Eye on Europe: This Populism Is Not Fascism

Europe’s “Brussels establishment and its media allies” insist that Europe is “haunted by the spectre of fascism,” never failing to “liken the rise of national-populism” to the Hitler era, fumes Joel Kotkin at Spiked, when “in reality, the ‘far right’ of today does not resemble the fascists of the 1920s and 1930s”: It lacks “a revolutionary vision,” and “does not appeal to educated elites” as fascism did under Mussolini and Hitler. “Reform’s base comes from what was once Labour’s bulwark among the working class” in Britain, while the AfD “made major gains in the Ruhr, the long-time linchpin of Germany’s fading industrial heartland.” The bogus comparison “serves a purpose” in allowing “Europe’s elites, and their mimics in Britain, to deflect attention from the real cause of the rightward turn: their own failures.”

Foreign desk: China Now Owns Russia

“Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in order to restore Russia’s imperial greatness,” smirks David Kirichenko at The Hill, but “he may go down in history as the man who transformed Russia into China’s junior partner.” Russia now “relies heavily on China for everything from electronics and industrial machinery to automobiles and dual-use technologies” that sustain Putin’s “war machine.” Beijing is “Moscow’s primary economic lifeline:” from “microchips” to “artificial intelligence” to “energy.” To pursue his “brutal war,” Putin “is sacrificing Russia’s economic future while steadily increasing Beijing’s leverage over Moscow.” Proof: “Moscow is restructuring parts of the Russian Far East around Chinese economic needs.” It’s all “binding Russia ever tighter to a relationship in which Beijing holds the upper hand.”

From the right: Seeking Martyrs at Delaney Hall

Delaney Hall protestors say that they are “concerned with improving conditions for the detainees,” but in reality their “real goal of these protests has always been to shut the ICE facility down,” rumbles The Wall Street Journal’s William McGurn. They push sensational claims of overcrowding and “maggot-infested and spoiled food” while New Jersey Democrats join in with lawsuits seeking to shut the center down.

Gov. Mikie Sherill called in state troopers to shut down some rioting while pretending “the enemy of peace is ICE, not the protesters who were actually fighting the troopers.” Yet the anti-ICE fanatics still see her as “no better than Donald Trump” simply because she moved to avoid “what might have been a Minneapolis-style tragedy.” It seems the rioters “half-hope that someone will be killed” so New Jersey can add more “progressive martyrs to energize the cause.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board