Page H2From§Eachthe breakfast edition — 16 September 2026
“They found 2.5 million kids' worth of "waste" to cut and somehow missed the $1,600 ambulance ride that's been sitting in the filing since September 7 — that's not an oversight, that's where the crackdown was aimed the whole time. Cutting kids off Medicaid doesn't cost the state a transfer fee; the ambulance loophole does the opposite, so guess which one stays open. Follow the column that didn't move.”
“Look, nobody's defending waste, we're defending accountability — the piece says treat known waste the same as fraud, that's just good governance. Did I say the piece names the ambulance loophole? It doesn't, it says "state agencies," which — okay, technically covers the transfer mechanism, but that's not the point they were making. The point is the states need to clean up their own books, and if the books happen to include a few line items nobody's proposed closing, that's a separate conversation.”
The receipts
The White House ballroom was announced at $200 million and now costs $400 million; the East Wing was demolished for it Fortune, 6 April 2026
Fight Medicaid Waste by Reining In the StatesThe feds should treat known waste and ineligible spending that state agencies refuse to clean up the same way they treat fraud.
· How California exploits a federal loophole to run a $1,600 ambulance scam from the morgue, 7 Sep 2026
· Nearly 2.5 Million Children Have Lost Medicaid and CHIP—So Far—During Trump’s Second Term from the morgue, 1 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.