Monday, May 25, 2026
Oz Is Cracking Down on Waste, Fraud, and Abuse. Medicare Advantage Should Be Next
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz has made reducing waste, fraud, and abuse a central focus of the Trump administration's healthcare agenda. No program needs it more than Medicare Advantage.
Medicare Advantage helps millions of seniors and people with disabilities find flexible health insurance plans that traditional Medicare can’t provide. But broken incentives in the program have allowed insurers to extract billions of taxpayer dollars in improper payments, with no corresponding improvement in care.
If U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and CMS Administrator Oz are serious about tackling waste and fraud, they should work with Congress to reform Medicare Advantage.
While traditional Medicare works well for many Americans, its one-size-fits-all structure is not right for everyone. Medicare Advantage was created to offer beneficiaries more options and flexibility through privately administered health plans.
Less discussed, however, is how Medicare Advantage's reimbursement structure incentivizes practices that unnecessarily increase taxpayer spending and erode trust in the healthcare system.
When patients first enroll in an MA plan, insurance representatives often meet with them to conduct in-depth health questionnaires that detail their medical history and daily habits. Insurers then use these questionnaires to assign patients “risk scores,” which determine how much CMS reimburses private insurers for care.
If this sounds like a conflict of interest, it is. Insurers receive higher reimbursement payments from the government for patients deemed sicker or more medically complex, creating a strong financial incentive to inflate patient "risk scores." And research has found that insurers routinely assign risk scores that overstate patient risk.
Then, when patients get sick, insurance representatives also perform at-home visits called “health risk assessments” to update a patient’s risk score. Insurers are prone to “upcoding” in these situations – exaggerating the severity of a medical issue to further inflate the patient's risk score.
For example, an investigation from STAT revealed that UnitedHealthcare diagnosed Medicare Advantage patients with peripheral artery disease at nearly three times the rate seen among those with traditional Medicare. The resulting higher risk scores allowed UnitedHealthcare to extract an additional $3,600 in government payments per patient.
Upcoding isn’t a new phenomenon. According to a 2023 Inspector General report, over $7.5 billion of Medicare Advantage’s risk-adjusted payments came from health risk assessments alone. In 2025, Medicare Advantage’s improper payment rate exceeded 6% – totalling over $23.5 billion in lost taxpayer money. If this pattern continues, Medicare Advantage overpayments could cost taxpayers up to $1.2 trillion over the next decade.
It would be unfair to place the blame entirely on insurers. They are simply responding to the financial incentives embedded in a program created by Congress. Still, many insurers have continued to exploit the system through aggressive and dishonest coding practices, even after multiple high-profile insurers settled upcoding cases with the federal government for hundreds of millions of dollars.
The broader consequence is a growing distrust in the healthcare system. Patients lose faith in insurers that prioritize reimbursement over care, while taxpayers rightly question where their tax dollars are going. Policymakers must act fast to restore this trust, as millions more patients are expected to enroll in MA plans by 2030.
Thankfully, leaders in the White House are taking this issue seriously. But meaningful reform requires more than just executive action that can shift from administration to administration. Bills like the NO UPCODE Act are a stronger long-term solution. The legislation would address perverse incentives in Medicare Advantage's risk-adjustment system by requiring two years of diagnostic data rather than one and limiting the use of old or unrelated medical conditions when determining reimbursements.
Medicare Advantage works, but only when incentives are properly aligned. Fraud and waste have no place in our healthcare. Congress should join the White House in restoring accountability to the program and protecting patients and taxpayers.
Charles Sauer is president of the Market Institute and author of “Profit Motive: What Drives the Things We Do.”
'Bridging the Data Divide Against Biological Sabotage'
President Trump has a long list of vital foreign policy challenges on his plate these days. His energy, time and focus are rightly dedicated to the crises that dominate the attention of world leaders and our international media.
There is, however, another dangerous threat to the United States, one that lurks below the surface: China’s ongoing and accelerating use of biological weapons that could lead to significant loss of life and major disruption to our way of life.
For decades, the United States has viewed biological threats through the lens of public health—a matter of "consequence management" to be handled after the first patient arrives in the emergency room. But in an era of rapid genomic engineering and adversarial persistence from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), treating a biological strike like a natural outbreak is a recipe for strategic defeat.
We must recognize that the nature of the threat has fundamentally changed. Our adversaries no longer view biological agents merely as weapons of mass destruction, but as tools of "intelligent warfare." If we are to protect the North American continent, we must shift our posture from reacting to pathogens to denying their impact through early Indicators and Warning (I&W).
The CCP’s 14th Five-Year Plan and its National Defense Strategy make one thing clear: Beijing intends to dominate the global bioeconomy and the "bio-foundry" of the future. Through its Military-Civil Fusion strategy, the CCP is systematically blurring the lines between medical research and offensive capability. They are investing billions in synthetic biology, massive genomic data collection—often harvested from unsuspecting global populations—and AI-driven pathogen enhancement.
The 2025 ODNI Annual Threat Assessment describes China as the “most comprehensive and robust” competitor to the U.S. in biotechnology. The most recent 2026 ODNI Annual Threat Assessment warned, “Beijing is investing heavily in collecting health and genetic data at scale” as AI and advanced technologies help build weapons design for battlefield advantage. Recent Defense Intelligence reports highlight a sobering reality: China is now the world’s best-equipped biosecurity threat actor. Their goal is not just to match our capabilities, but to create "leap-ahead" biological advantages that can bypass traditional medical countermeasures. Whether through engineered pathogens with no natural signatures or the subtle sabotage of our agricultural and pharmaceutical supply chains, the threat is persistent, hybrid, and largely invisible to our current sensors.
The United States made meaningful progress during the first Trump administration with the release of the 2018 National Biodefense Strategy, which elevated biological threats as a national security priority; however, during the Biden administration that momentum did not translate into sustained operational capability. The National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology (NSCEB) warned the U.S. is “falling behind.” In 2025 the NSCEB published 49 recommendations, a document that elevates biotech as a defense capability and a strategic domain of national power that must be coordinated, scaled, and defended like energy, nuclear, or AI.
The United States currently lacks a scalable, defense-grade capability to detect, characterize, and attribute biological attacks in real-time. Our current federal surveillance architectures are fragmented, heavily siloed, and optimized for retrospective reporting. In a crisis, the hours lost to administrative friction and "data silos" are hours the adversary uses to achieve strategic surprise.
Agencies and healthcare institutions often refuse to share sensitive data due to valid regulatory concerns and security risks. This "data divide" is our greatest vulnerability. To gain decision advantage, we must transition security-proven architectures from the federal healthcare ecosystem directly into the national security domain. We need a system that doesn't just collect data but surfaces anomalous activity during the opening hours of an event—before a local outbreak becomes a national catastrophe.
The Biological Defense Surveillance Network (BIONET) represents the necessary evolution of our national defense. Designed to meet the rigorous requirements of the December 2025 JPEO-CBRND request for genomic sequencing workflows. BIONET moves beyond the failed model of centralized databases that are vulnerable to cyber-attack and administrative gridlock. BIONET essentially translates the NSCEB recommendations into operational reality by delivering what current policy frameworks lack: a unified, real-time early warning system capable of detecting adversarial biological activity at speed and scale.
The Department of War and the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) have a narrow window to act. By utilizing established FDA Medical Counter-Measure contract vehicles, the administration can fund a 24-month prototype and pilot of BIONET. This is a low-risk, high-velocity pathway to validate the integration and governance needed for a permanent program of record.
The choice before us is stark. We can continue to rely on a reactive, public-health-first model that cedes the initiative to our adversaries, or we can build a proactive defense that turns biological data into a strategic asset. We must strip the veil of anonymity from biological threats. The technology to provide our leaders with time-sensitive warnings exists today.
President Trump and his administration have clearly demonstrated a remarkable capacity to manage a broad range of high-priority issues simultaneously. This threat from China can and should be acted on now to block their aggressive moves to attack us on this front.
Dr. Vahan Simonyan has held senior scientific and technical leadership roles across the U.S. federal government, including serving as a Senior Scientist in genetics and Director of R&D Bioinformatics at the FDA. He developed FDA Hive which serves as a regulatory analytics platform used to evaluate life saving products such as CRISPR-based therapies, oncology and T-cell treatments, pathogen detection and vaccine safety. A professor at George Washington University, he has an MS in Physical Organic Chemistry and Ph.Ds in Quantum Physics and Mathematics.
'From high school athlete and Amazon worker to White House shooter'
The 21-year-old Maryland man killed by federal agents as he opened fire at a White House checkpoint Saturday was a former high school athlete and Amazon driver before his mental health deteriorated and his worsening delusions of grandeur alienated close friends and family.
Nasire Best was on the track team at Dundalk High School a few miles outside Baltimore, where he graduated in 2023, according to the Banner, which spoke to friends and former teammates about his descent into madness.
A fellow track-team member who asked to remain anonymous said Best had “never been an aggressive person,” describing him as a “very energetic” and “light-hearted” person who “believed he could achieve great things if he put his mind to it.”
The first overt troubling sign of Best losing control came last year as he was evicted from his apartment for failing to pay rent — and didn’t even bother showing up for the court proceedings, according to legal records viewed by the outlet.
The teammate said Best had a job but was obviously grappling with mental health-struggles and had become increasingly “irritable,” leading to the dissolution of the friendship.
Jerome Patterson, who also ran track with Best, described himself as the gunman’s closest friend — saying the duo worked together at Amazon after graduation.
It was during this period that Best’s grasp of reality noticeably began to slip to those closest to him.
“We both worked alongside each other sitting and chatting every day, he came to me about everything, and everything was fine until randomly he started talking about being in control of people and reality and how he could tap into a different frequency and hear and peep things that we couldn’t,” Patterson told the outlet.
Patterson said that before long Best, started believing he was God, which he said prompted him to quit the job at Amazon.
“He eventually blocked and stopped talking to his closest friends and disappeared,” Patterson said, claiming that Best was also estranged from his family.
After Saturday’s shooting, a source told The Post that Best was a mentally troubled individual who was known to the Secret Service for acting strangely and loitering around the White House grounds.
In June, the agency had sought to have him involuntarily committed after he blocked a vehicle attempting to enter the grounds of the White House.
In one incident July 10, Best claimed to be Jesus Christ and said he wanted to get arrested, according to court records of the incident.
He was taken into custody but released by a DC judge on the condition he keep his distance from the White House.
Best failed to show up for his next court appearance and was wanted for arrest ever since.
On Saturday, he fired several shots outside a White House gate, wounding two bystanders before federal agents took him down in a hail of bullets.
'Goldman Says Market Can Handle $600B Stock Supply Wave, but Timing Is Tricky'
Bull markets have a way of creating their own complications. The stronger sentiment gets, the more companies want to raise capital, the more private equity firms look for exits, and the more IPO pipelines fill up with names that spent years waiting for the right moment. All of that is happening simultaneously right now, and Goldman Sachs is paying close attention to what it means for a market that is already navigating elevated yields and increasingly crowded positioning in AI-related stocks.
Tony Pasquariello, Goldman’s global head of hedge fund coverage, laid out the bank’s thinking in a client note following meetings with portfolio managers in Boston and Toronto on May 22. The core of his analysis is straightforward: Goldman estimates total equity market supply in 2026 will reach approximately $600 billion, with roughly $160 billion of that figure tied directly to U.S. IPO activity. The question he is putting to investors is whether a market running hot on AI enthusiasm can absorb that much new stock without something giving way.
The Numbers in Context
Six hundred billion dollars sounds like a number large enough to matter. Pasquariello’s argument is that the right way to evaluate it is not in nominal terms but as a share of total market capitalization, and by that measure, the current situation is not historically extreme.
Goldman drew comparisons to several previous periods when equity issuance surged significantly. The late 1990s technology bubble, the post-financial crisis recapitalizations of 2009, the pandemic-era capital raising of 2020, and the SPAC frenzy of 2021 all generated their own waves of new supply that markets eventually had to work through. In each case, the outcome depended heavily on the quality of what was being issued and the underlying risk appetite of buyers.
Goldman’s conclusion is that U.S. markets remain capable of absorbing new issuance, provided the assets coming to market are genuinely high quality and investor risk appetite holds up. That is a reasonable baseline assumption given current conditions. It is also a conditional one, which is precisely what makes the next several months interesting to watch.
The IPO Pipeline Is Getting Serious
The $160 billion IPO estimate is not a vague projection. Goldman forecasts roughly 100 U.S. IPOs this year capable of generating that level of proceeds, and the names circulating at the top of the pipeline give that number real credibility. SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic have all been discussed as potential candidates for major listings, and any one of those would rank among the most significant public offerings in recent memory.
When names of that scale enter the market, the dynamics shift in ways that go beyond simple supply and demand. Capital that would otherwise sit in existing secondary market positions gets reallocated toward new offerings. Investors build up cash in anticipation of participating in deals. Seasoned investors begin sizing down current holdings to build the dry powder they need when a listing they have been tracking for years finally arrives.
That reallocation process does not necessarily break markets, but it does change the marginal liquidity environment in ways that make further valuation expansion harder to sustain across the board.
Three Stress Tests Hitting at the Same Time
What makes Goldman’s analysis particularly relevant right now is the timing. The IPO supply wave is not arriving in a calm market. It is arriving alongside two other forces that each carry their own weight.
First, Treasury yields have remained stubbornly elevated. Goldman’s research has historically shown that equity markets tend to experience pressure when the 10-year Treasury yield rises meaningfully in a short window. With yields staying higher than many investors expected heading into the second half of the year, the cost of holding equity risk remains higher than the recent market performance might suggest.
Second, positioning in AI-related semiconductors has reached a level of concentration that Goldman itself has flagged as notable. The bank’s Hedge Fund Trend Monitor, which analyzed holdings across 1,059 hedge funds managing $4.6 trillion in gross equity positions, found that funds entered Q2 2026 with their highest-ever portfolio weight in semiconductor companies at 10 percent. Software, by contrast, sits at its lowest weight since 2019 at 6 percent.
That level of crowding does not automatically mean a correction is coming. But it does mean that any meaningful disappointment in the AI narrative, a softer-than-expected earnings report, a shift in hyperscaler spending commentary, or a broader risk-off move could produce an outsized market reaction simply because so many investors are positioned the same way.
What Goldman Is Actually Saying
The takeaway from Pasquariello’s note is not a warning that markets are about to break down. Goldman believes the system can handle what is coming. The more nuanced point is that three separate forces, rising IPO supply, elevated yields, and crowded AI positioning are converging at the same moment, and that combination deserves more attention than any single factor would warrant on its own.
Markets absorb supply all the time. They do it most comfortably when sentiment is strong, quality is high, and positioning is not already stretched. Right now, one of those three conditions is less comfortable than the other two. That is what Wall Street is quietly working through, and why Goldman thought it was worth putting in writing.
'Iran may restore internet to pre-January limits - state media'
Iran’s authorities approved returning internet access to its pre-January 2026 status, state media reported on Monday after 87 days of digital blackout and isolation from the global internet.
The reports, citing informed sources, said the decision was made at a meeting of the Supreme Council of Cyberspace chaired by Vice President Mohammadreza Aref.
The reports come as internet access has been cut in Iran since the start of the war with the United States and Israel. Before that, access had also been disrupted around January 8 and 9, during nationwide protests.