As Congress faces a new farm bill, it's almost certain that members of both parties will "manage" to avoid discussing the crop insurance fraud current and past farm bills perpetuate. Yeah, the story is based on farmers and insurers who got busted, but? It took years to bust them and there's surely plenty of more subtle, unbusted fraudsters still out there.
This:
In an AgWeb article detailing how federal agents busted a record-breaking $100 million crop insurance fraud ring in North Carolina, Don Doles, the lead investigator of the case, said that despite his record-breaking case, he and his fellow agents “touched about a tenth of those truly participating at some level,” adding that “the scope of what happened is so much bigger than what could ever be included in a story.” To that end, it’s possible that crop insurance fraud costs taxpayers somewhere in the ballpark of a billion dollars a year.
For Doles, the most frustrating aspect of the case was just how involved the big tobacco companies were in the fraud scheme. “The person acting as dealer hauls off the unaccounted [for] tobacco, bought at half price and sells it to a big tobacco company that snaps up great tobacco for $1.75, even though they know it’s shady,” Doles explained to AgWeb.
Confirms that.
Subsidies from the USDA to help with crop insurance (how many "conservative" farmers rant against national health care?) make it worse.
So, why can't the Rethuglican half of Congress, most supportive of the fraud and largess, along with the Democrap half of Congress, generally being tolerant of this in exchange for scraps of TANF, SNAP and school lunch money, give us national health care?
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