Growing national outrage over Minnesota's welfare fraud is justified, but not because of where it took place or because it implicates members of any immigrant community. It's much more than a "Minnesota" story.

The outrage is justified because Americans are finally getting a concrete look at what happens when pushing public money out the door matters more than verifying the eligibility of the recipients, confirming services were delivered or, ultimately, being a good steward of taxpayers' money.

Since 2022, investigators have uncovered a staggering amount of fraud, including $250 million siphoned from pandemic-era child nutrition programs to a network of individuals and shell companies, and have secured dozens of indictments with more prosecutions underway. But it goes beyond that.

Federal prosecutors now suggest that up to half of the $18 billion spent on 14 Medicaid-funded Minnesota programs since 2018 may have been tied to fraud. The scandal touches programs covering housing assistance, autism therapy and other welfare services. Even if those estimates are ultimately revised downward, the pattern is unmistakable. Fraud did not merely slip through the cracks. It became routine.

Minnesota is not the exception but rather the example Americans finally noticed. Medicaid fraud has been endemic at the state and federal levels for decades. Politicians haven't done much, even with scholars and journalists raising the alarm.

Medicaid reports $543 billion in "improper payments" over the past decade, though that figure omits one of the largest sources of error: whether states........

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