They Are Not Losing Coverage. They Are Holding the Bill for a Ghost-Service Racket.

By Phillip C. Parrish
Freedom Talk with Phil
October 2, 2026

If you got the letter, you are not crazy, and you are not alone. More than 320,000 Minnesotans are being told their Medicare Advantage plan is going away in 2027. Blue Cross is scrapping most of its current plans. Medica, HealthPartners, and UnitedHealthcare are cutting counties. Humana is dropping individual Medicare Advantage in the state.

The Minnesota DFL put a frightened couple on a graphic this morning and wrote that those seniors are set to lose health care coverage because Minnesota Republicans backed Donald Trump. That is false witness. The Star Tribune story they linked does not mention Trump. It does not mention Republicans. It says the insurers lost money for years on medical costs, drug costs, and people using more services, and they are done eating the losses.

You are not losing Medicare. You are being handed a shopping notice. Original Medicare is still there. Blue Cross says it is not leaving the market, and that most of its members will still have a Blue Cross option. What you are losing is the cheap extra plan. The question a normal Minnesotan asks next is the one the graphic will not answer. Why did the plans blow up here, and who was in charge while the bills were being faked?

The letter is the cleanup

Blue Cross CEO Dana Erickson told the Star Tribune the company lost about $500 million on Medicare Advantage over three years. Even a nonprofit cannot run at a loss forever. In Hennepin County the out-of-pocket cap on the new plans jumps toward $9,850. A hospital stay that used to be one copay becomes $450 or $500 a day.

This is the second bad year in a row. The first blow was UCare. The Minneapolis nonprofit posted a $102 million loss in 2023 and a $478 million loss in 2024. A federal audit found most of the high-risk diagnosis codes it sent to Medicare were not in the medical record: 254 of 294 sampled years unsupported, at least $4.7 million in overpayments for 2018 and 2019 alone. In September 2025 the federal government terminated UCare’s Medicare Advantage contracts. About 158,000 members in Minnesota and western Wisconsin were dumped. The company went out of business. Blue Cross has said part of the 2027 mess is spillover from that death.

A September 2026 federal audit put UnitedHealthcare, the Minnetonka company, at about $46.9 million in inflated Medicare billing for 2020 and 2021. Strokes, embolisms, cancers. Charts that did not support the code. That is the quiet version of a ghost service. The patient may be real. The diagnosis that raised the check was not.

Nationally, insurers are cutting plans because the medical trend broke their margins. CMS says average Medicare Advantage premiums are projected to fall, and most people can stay in a plan. Minnesota is worse than the national picture because we already lost a carrier, and because our public-program book was contaminated.

Ghost clients, ghost visits, ghost diagnoses

Start with the cases a neighbor can understand.

Yesterday two Twin Cities men pleaded guilty to defrauding Housing Stabilization Services. Their company, Pristine Health, billed Minnesota Medicaid more than $820,000. They enrolled about 90 people, including some who never agreed to the service, and got paid for work that was never done. Federal prosecutors have called the wider Medicaid wave industrial-scale and likely into the billions. Housing Stabilization payouts peaked around $105 million in 2024. Governor Tim Walz canceled the program only after prosecutors said most of the payouts were fraudulent.

The autism program was built the same way. Federal charging documents say centers billed Medicaid for services that were not rendered, and that parents were offered kickbacks to get children labeled and enrolled. A Duluth therapist was charged this week with more than $2.25 million in false claims. UCare referred him after a member reported one short phone call and a stack of bills. Investigators found 468 days billed at more than 24 hours, and 15 of 117 supposed patients who never had a session. Some had never heard of him.

That is the culture. A client who is not a client. A visit that is not a visit. A diagnosis that is not in the chart. The mill bills the plan. The plan bills the taxpayer, or bills Medicare for a sicker patient than the one in the room. When the music stops, the carrier dies or dumps the county, and the party mailer blames the other party.

The names on the door

Tim Walz was the governor while this matured. His Department of Education and Department of Human Services sat on Feeding Our Future, the child-nutrition racket that became the largest COVID-meal fraud case in the country, with dozens of guilty pleas. His administration stood up and then failed to police Housing Stabilization Services, the autism billing program, and the personal-care mills. He spent the $17.5 billion surplus in 2023, passed the biggest budget in state history, about $72 billion, and raised taxes on the way out. By December 2023 the next budget was already staring at a deficit driven by health and human services. He canceled the housing program late, after the money was gone. The seniors getting letters in October 2026 are living in the state he ran.

Peggy Flanagan was his lieutenant governor, and she is the DFL nominee for U.S. Senate. She now says Walz took the lead on fraud and that she did not run the agencies. The Star Tribune reported she was present for conversations about misuse of public funds. Former Human Services Commissioner Jodi Harpstead told Congress Flanagan sat in on some of those talks with Walz. Flanagan’s own portfolio included the Interagency Council on Homelessness, while a homelessness-related Medicaid program was being billed for services nobody delivered. Being in the room and then claiming the room belonged to someone else is not a defense. It is the DFL chain of command.

Keith Ellison is the attorney general, and his office houses the Medicaid Fraud Control Unit. He is charging cases now, including the Duluth therapist and a personal-care agency. Good. Late. In December 2021, while the meal-program fraud was already in court and payments were in dispute, Ellison met with figures tied to Feeding Our Future. On a recording he told them he was there to help, and spoke of fighting the state officials who had cut the money off. Days later, on December 20, 2021, men associated with that network gave his campaign the maximum. He returned $12,500 from five of them in a 2025 report, years after the indictments. One earlier check, from a man who later pleaded guilty, came back in 2022. Partners in Nutrition, a nonprofit that steered nearly $100 million toward the meal fraud, just settled with his office for $18.5 million and agreed to dissolve. The top legal officer of the state took the meetings, took the checks, and spent the fat years treating the whistleblowers as the problem.

Amy Klobuchar has been a United States senator from Minnesota since 2007. The meal money was federal. The Medicare overpayments were federal. The Medicaid match is federal. She was the senior senator from the state Obama held up in May 2023 as the place to watch, and she did not make the ghost-service racket her fight while the checks were clearing. Minnesota’s model was her party’s brand. The brand was a surplus set on fire, a nonprofit layer that billed for people it never met, and a health-finance complex that called the losses “utilization.” A senator who can find a camera for every other Minnesota story can find one for this.

Steve Simon does not run Medicaid. He runs the other half of the same machine. As secretary of state he has refused to turn voter-roll data over to the U.S. Department of Justice, rejected the federal citizenship-check system other states use, and left the Legislative Auditor struggling to get basic election data out of his office. The DFL just renominated him on a promise to protect their system. A party that will not open the voter roll and would not open the nonprofit invoice is running one culture, not two. Hide the list. Pay the claim. Call the person who asks a threat.

The DFL and its DSA partners wrote the 2023 session Obama praised. Obama posted that elections have consequences and told the country to look at Minnesota. Walz quote-posted him the same day. What they were celebrating was historic spending, weaker guards on who gets a program, and a political class that treated oversight as cruelty. The DSA did not invent the ghost bill. It supplied the doctrine that made the ghost bill rude to question: more programs, faster enrollment, anyone who asks for a receipt is the enemy. The DFL supplied the agencies, the budgets, and the incumbents.

What to do with the letter

Open enrollment runs October 15 through December 7. Shop the network, not the party graphic. A new Medicare Advantage plan, if your doctors are still in it. Original Medicare plus a supplement, if you would rather pay a premium than a surprise. Fairview has already said it is done with UnitedHealthcare Medicare Advantage on January 1, 2027. Ask the clinic, then ask the plan.

Then ask the people who had the seats. Walz ran the agencies. Flanagan sat in the fraud talks and now wants a promotion. Ellison met the meal-program crew and banked their donations. Klobuchar watched federal money move through her state and kept the brand. Simon kept the other books closed. The DFL put your worry on a graphic and named the wrong villain.

A Minnesota that tells the truth

A decent state does not use a senior as a prop. It pays for care that happened, to a patient who exists, from a provider who can show the note. It returns a surplus or banks it. It prosecutes the mill while the mill is cashing checks, not after the carrier dies. Farmers, veterans, parish workers, and retirees in Kenyon, Duluth, and St. Cloud can live with a hard bill. They cannot live with a government that lies about why the bill came.

The graphic is false. The culture is real. The names are on the door.

Phillip C. Parrish
Freedom Talk with Phil
phillip@parrish4mn.com
Heidi Wanty, heidi@parrish4mn.com
(612) 460-1717
parrish4mn.com

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