These are strange days at the Department of Justice. Attorney General Pam Bondi seems completely willing to do the bidding of Donald Trump, yet there have been press reports that he is unhappy she has not moved faster to prosecute his perceived political foes. The DOJ is not conducting a probe of the ICE officer who fatally shot a woman in Minneapolis, but it is investigating the political ties of the woman’s spouse. Investigations are also underway involving members of Congress who posted messages reminding servicemembers that they are not required to obey illegal orders.
Amid this insanity, it turns out there are people at the DOJ who are still doing their job in a normal way, particularly with regard to the prosecution of corporate crime. The Department just announced that it has reached a $556 million settlement with Kaiser Permanente to resolve allegations that the health system engaged in a scheme to inflate its Medicare Advantage reimbursements by pressuring physicians to add invalid diagnoses to their records of patient visits. Kaiser was said to have linked physician and facility financial bonuses and incentives to their cooperation with the scheme.
Kaiser is far from the only company to face accusations of cheating Medicare Advantage, the portion of Medicare most like an HMO. In 2023 insurer Cigna paid over $170 million to resolve a case involving diagnostic codes. In 2025 Seoul Medical Group paid $58 million to settle accusations it submitted false diagnosis codes for two spinal conditions to increase payments from Medicare Advantage.
UnitedHealth Group is being investigated by DOJ over similar issues and was the focus of a recent Senate Judiciary Committee report suggesting that the company abuses the Medicare Advantage provisions that provide higher payments relating to patients with certain costly medical conditions.
The Trump Administration is giving cases such as these a lot less attention than the purported fraud being committed by Somali-run child care centers in Minneapolis. Lately, Trump has been threatening to revoke the naturalized citizenship of those convicted of fraud.
Fraud is a non-violent financial crime, yet Trump is proposing a punishment that has previously been reserved for the likes of naturalized citizens who turned out to be Nazi war criminals. The penalties being imposed on healthcare companies are, by contrast, a lot milder. Some of the monetary amounts are substantial, but they can easily be absorbed by an operation such as Kaiser Permanente, which takes in over $100 billion a year in revenue.
If the healthcare penalties were to be truly comparable to those confronting Somali-Americans, those companies would be faced with the possibility of losing their corporate charters, or at least being debarred from doing business with federal agencies. This would be the functional equivalent of denaturalization.
Of course, the Trump Administration is not proposing anything like that for the corporate healthcare fraudsters. They are let off with what amounts to a slap on the wrist, while the Somalis are considered to deserve the harshest possible punishment. So much for equal justice.
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