Welcome back to the podcast, bribe, swindle, or steel.

I'm Alexandra Rogge, and today we're talking about insurance fraud, with an emphasis on the very grisly practice of life insurance fraud.

My guest is Jim Quigle.

Jim is the director of communications for the Coalition Against Insurance Fraud. He's keen to get the word out about insurance fraud,

and we're delighted to have him on the podcast today. Jim, thank you for joining me.

Thank you for having me, Alexandra. It's great to be here with you. Can you start by providing

some context for listeners?

How much money are we talking about, at least in the United States, when we talk about insurance fraud?

Well, Alexandra, insurance fraud is one of the largest financial crimes in America.

It steals at least $80 billion with a capital B dollars a year in bogus claims. If you were to line up all those

dollar bills back to back, they would reach around the earth to the moon and back 17 times.

That's a lot of dollar bills and that's a lot of higher premiums that we're all paying.

The scope of this is surprising, but it breaks down into a number of very distinct

categories. And so why don't we start by what I know you have described as the most significant

category, which is health insurance fraud? Health insurance fraud is the 800-pound gorilla

in the world of insurance fraud. It dwarfs all other forms of insurance scams by degrees of magnitude. The money that's being sold is vast and almost unfathomable. The system itself, the health system, is a large ATM machine, and criminals are absolutely stealing it blind despite very good

efforts of fraud fighters to try to stop the outflow of money. What would be an example? This is

the health care providers side more than the health care beneficiaries. What would be an example?

How would this play out? We can start with a couple of

examples to really bring it home to everybody. There's a doctor named Salman Maligan in Palm Beach,

Florida, and he wanted to steal more than $42 million in Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurance money.

So what did he do? Well, he was an eye doctor. And what he started to do is diagnose them with ailments that they didn't have. These were

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