The Week in Meep, 18 Feb 2024: Navalny, Insurance Fraud, and Lent Begins
I always love stories on insurance fraud (well, as long as they're caught....)
I had a varied week, but first, breaking news….
Alexei Nalavny Died, another early death of a Putin Opponent
Financial Times Obit: Alexei Navalny, Russian opposition activist, 1976-2024
Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition activist who has been the most prominent critic of President Vladimir Putin’s regime for much of the past decade, has died in a remote Arctic penal colony aged 47, according to prison authorities.….
Navalny was poisoned in August 2020 with the Soviet-developed nerve agent novichok while campaigning in Siberia, in what he and western governments said was an assassination attempt ordered by the Kremlin. Treated in Germany, he later exposed a security services officer involved in the poisoning campaign when he published a recorded phone call in which the man unwittingly revealed the entire operation.
The link should allow a free read.
If not, this one is free:
AP News: Over 400 detained in Russia as country mourns the death of Alexei Navalny, Putin’s fiercest foe
Over 400 people were detained in Russia while paying tribute to opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died at a remote Arctic penal colony, a prominent rights group reported Sunday.
The sudden death of Navalny, 47, was a crushing blow to many Russians, who had pinned their hopes for the future on President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest foe. Navalny remained vocal in his unrelenting criticism of the Kremlin even after surviving a nerve agent poisoning and receiving multiple prison terms.
The news reverberated across the globe, with many world leaders blaming the death on Putin and his government. In an exchange with reporters shortly after leaving a Saturday church service, President Joe Biden reiterated his stance that Putin was ultimately to blame for Navalny’s death. “The fact of the matter is, Putin is responsible. Whether he ordered it, he’s responsible for the circumstance,” Biden said. “It’s a reflection of who he is. It cannot be tolerated.”
Since the move to substack, I have not written as much about my Russian-related doings.
I am still moderating the Bukovsky Center Facebook group, and involved with Ninth of November Press, which publishes English language books about the (supposed) fall of communism, where 11/9/1989 is the date of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Two heavily-related books are Litvinenko’s book, Allegations (sorry, only have the English translation for kindle):
And Bukovsky’s book Judgment in Moscow, which called for a Nuremberg-style hearing over the USSR:
I was involved in the publication of Judgment in Moscow, mainly in checking the footnotes, definitions, and end matter. Since the original publication (in Russian), the memory of many of the key players has eroded… which is a big shame. So we needed to put together bios as well as definitions of organizations, such as the Cheka.
In her piece on Navalny, Bari Weiss lists other people who came to an early end opposing the current Russian regime.
Bari Weiss at The Free Press: Alexei Navalny Lived and Died in Truth
In this, Navalny joins a long line of ordinary and noble people who were and are the victims of Stalinist tyranny and now Russian authoritarianism.
People like:
Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist and author of Putin’s Russia, who was shot dead on October 7, 2006—Putin’s birthday—in the elevator of her apartment building in Moscow. She was 48 years old.
Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB agent turned British defector, who was hospitalized for polonium-210 poisoning and died 22 days later, on November 23, 2006. His chief crime was saying out loud what everyone suspected: that the FSB had arranged for the the bombing of Moscow apartment buildings in 1999 as a pretext to start the second Chechen war.
Sergei Magnitsky, responsible for exposing corruption and misconduct by Russian government officials, who served 358 days in a Moscow prison before he died at 37 years old, on November 16, 2009.
Boris Nemtsov, who was assassinated on February 27, 2015, beside his Ukrainian wife on a bridge near the Kremlin, in Moscow, where he was organizing a rally against Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine.
In addition to these actual assassinations, there have been attempted assassinations as well as character assassinations. It continues.
Related:
2019: RIP, Vladimir Bukovsky (1942-2019), Fighter for Truth
2018: Around the Pension-o-Sphere: the "Strong Men" of Venezuela and Russia Can Do Only So Much
2022: Memorial: A Well-Deserved Nobel Peace Prize
2017: Mortality Monday: Suspicious Russian Deaths
The Cost of Insurance Fraud!
A big Medicare-related fraud hit the news recently, and Jerry Theodorou at R Street had a piece putting the estimated costs together:
Insurance Journal: Insurance Fraud on the March
Bonnie and Clyde, Ma Barker, Baby Face Nelson and Willie Sutton robbed banks. When asked by a journalist asked why he did, Sutton famously replied “because that’s where the money is.” If banks’ $3.1 trillion in cash and invested assets draws criminals to steal from banks, the insurance industry’s $10 trillion in assets arguably tempts fraudsters yet more. And it does.
Whereas banks’ annual losses from fraud are on the order of $2.7 billion, insurance fraud measures a staggering $308.6 billion annually. The FBI, which prosecutes significant insurance fraud cases, affirms the insurance industry’s massive size “contributes significantly to the cost of insurance fraud by providing more opportunities and bigger incentives for committing illegal activities.” And from the fraudster’s point of view, insurance fraud is a crime not requiring a gun, a mask or a getaway car. In an era of congressional hearings on how to reduce the cost of insurance for consumers, one solution is to attack insurance fraud. Insurers’ fraud-related losses are passed onto all policyholders. If insurance fraud were wiped out premiums would be 10 percent lower.
This is part of the Medicare fraud ring I was referring to:
CBS News: Brooklyn business connected to multimillion dollar suspected Medicare fraud ring
Medicare recipients across the country say a Brooklyn business has been fraudulently collecting taxpayer dollars for medical supplies in their names, and CBS2 Investigates has learned this company is connected to a multimillion dollar suspected fraud ring.
Investigative reporter Tim McNicholas reviewed records showing Medicare paid thousands per person for catheters that recipients say they never ordered or even needed.
That’s just one piece of the puzzle. What’s interesting is that Congress is looking into having the federal government deploy AI tools to detect this sort of fraud…
…but these are the sort of claims fraud tools that private health insurers use to deny claims, and the politicians get nasty about them. They are about to run into the difficulties of claims functions in insurance/healthcare operations. Best wishes!
(Okay, there are multiple parts to Congress, not just a matter of party. Still, it would be interesting to see parts being pro-AI-claims-denying and other parts being anti-AI-claims-denying.)
Life insurance fraud is usually not on the claims side… but it has happened. You can hear about it in some of my podcast episodes below.
Related Podcast Episodes
2022: Fraudulent life insurers
2022: Don't sell (life) insurance to the mafia
2024: The Sentinel Effect, Centenarians, and Pension Fraud
2022: Dickens and business fraud
Ash Wednesday…. It Begins
A few people didn’t get that I was joking, especially in light of the reading for Ash Wednesday….
….but mainly, I do give the people handing out ashes a lot of canvas to work with.
Memento Mori
Stu and I are using this book for our Lenten prayer and meditations:
Back in 2021, I backed the author’s Kickstarter for her Advent version. We liked her Advent devotional, so I got her Lenten one.
If you follow my Twitter/X account, you’ll see me post a quote from it each morning, like:
Okay, some are a little less harsh:
So you may follow my Twitter/X feed for such items (they tend to be fairly early in the morning, around 5 a.m. ET. — of course, the 3am posts tend to be my Wordle results.)
