NEW: RFK Jr. says Medicare spending on wound care patches exploded from $200 million in 2019 to $14 billion last year: “It’s all stolen.”
Bad actors billed Medicare billions by slapping the most expensive skin grafts on elderly and dying patients who didn’t need them.
“The doctors who prescribed them would get 6% of the sales cost. And so, they were incentivized to prescribe more expensive products. In Europe, they spend 35 cents a cubic inch. We were spending $135, and that went up to $2,000 a cubic inch.”
“So 2019, we were paying $200 million. Last year we spent 14 billion. All stolen. It’s all stolen. And we were on track to spend 23 billion this year.”
“We put an end to it, and we now have driven that cost down to somewhere around a billion dollars.”
In one Arizona case, the owners of two wound care companies pleaded guilty to more than $1.2 billion in fraudulent claims. Medicare paid over $1 million per patient for grafts slapped on elderly patients who didn’t need them, many of them dying in hospice.
In June, DOJ charged 11 more defendants over more than $2 billion in allograft claims, including a company accused of issuing sham invoices to inflate what Medicare paid.
It feels like every week I learn a new way people were ripping off taxpayers for billions.
NEW: RFK Jr. says Medicare spending on wound care patches exploded from $200 million in 2019 to $14 billion last year: "It's all stolen."
Bad actors billed Medicare billions by slapping the most expensive skin grafts on elderly and dying patients who didn't need them.
"The… pic.twitter.com/IUQxlzFNSr
— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) September 30, 2026
RFK Jr. says the administration cut projected wound-care spending from $23 billion to about $1 billion
At the MAHA Summit, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Medicare and Medicaid spending on skin substitutes used in wound care rose from about $200 million in 2019 to $14 billion in 2025 and was “on track to spend $23 billion this year.”
Kennedy said the administration changed the payment system and had brought the spending down to roughly $1 billion, describing the difference as money saved. Those are Kennedy’s figures and characterization; they do not establish that $22 billion in previously paid Medicare money was recovered.
There is, however, independent evidence that something was badly wrong in this particular area.
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