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Phil Hirschkorn: Hey, we still have innocent to proven guilty in this country.
My question is, what else do you got?
What else has your task force flagged that we should be concerned about?
Because those amounts are a lot, $46 million, $1.7 million, but they don't really compare to California and Minnesota.
What else should we expect from your task force?
Thank you.
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VP J.D. Vance: Let me say a few things.
Ladies and gentlemen, we've got biased reporters in all states.
It's okay.
Trust me.
I can handle it.
But here's what I'd say a few things.
Number one, you talk about the scale of the fraud being less in Maine than it is in California.
Well, California has a population that's much higher than Maine.
So that's not necessarily a fair comparison.
Number two, we've frankly been at this less long than we have in Maine than in other states. Okay?
This is something where what we, I would say, you notice a pattern.
And you're right, innocent until proven guilty.
But what I've noticed is a pattern - that when you see certain types of fraud in certain types of programs, that's the tip of the iceberg.
And when I see that autism services fraud in the Medicaid program in the Somali community, but not just that, I see local and state politicians who don't care about policing that fraud.
That's the tip of the iceberg.
And we're going to find out just how deep that iceberg is.
And I suspect - I can't promise - but I suspect we are going to find hundreds of millions of more dollars every single month that we look in the state of Maine because this is not a state that takes it seriously.
And this is the third point and the most important one: I do not actually like having a contentious relationship between the state government and the federal government.
We want people to help us find the fraudsters.
It goes a lot quicker.
It's a lot easier.
It requires fewer resources from the federal government.
But you find more fraud when you're working with people at the local level.
What I find so preposterous about Maine, it's not just that we found tens of millions of dollars of fraud in a relatively small state.
It's that we've had no cooperation from the state government.
So when I say, that the state government, when I say this is the third, maybe the fourth worst state when it comes to fraud, what I mean very simply is you've got a governor and you've got a set of bureaucrats that don't care about fraud.
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