A former program coordinator at a health services company is blowing the whistle — alleging to Newsnation that a Somali-American-led contractor in Maine defrauded the state’s Medicaid program by falsifying client visit records. That left taxpayers to fund the bill for services that were never completed.
Christopher Bernardini, who worked for and was later fired from Gateway Community Services, the health services contractor at the heart of the scandal, told NewsNation that the scheme got worse during the pandemic, alleging that when the company received a PPP loan, it started giving out bonuses to undeserving employees. Bernardini is putting a public face on a scandal that first started to come to light in May, when local news outlet MaineWire reported that Gateway Community Services had inflated Medicaid billing for at least seven years, and received a violation for overbilling MaineCare by nearly a million dollars between 2015-2017, according to former employees.
On Saturday 17 January, the government of Iran claimed that the United States is making false accusations against the country in its latest attempt to “fuel tensions” in the region. It dismissed t...