Watching Medicaid Fraud Was Castor's Job. What Happened?
Kathy Castor has sat on the committee that oversees Medicare and Medicaid for seventeen years. In her own district, $126 million in fraud moved through it anyway.
Kathy Castor has sat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee for seventeen years. This panel oversees CMS, the federal agency running Medicare and Medicaid. Watching those programs for fraud isn't extra credit for someone in that chair. It's the job description.
The fraud kept coming anyway. Prosecutors have charged more than $126 million in Medicare and Medicaid fraud in Tampa in the current enforcement window, and every dollar of it moved through her own district. Leo Corrigan was charged in June 2026, over $7.5 million in fraudulent Medicare billing, and roughly $1.8 million in kickbacks. The case is still working its way through court. Rustam Abdaev didn't even fight it, he's already pleaded guilty to more than $19 million in false medical-equipment claims and is waiting for a sentencing date. Then there's the wound-care scheme, another $118 million in false billing. None of it happened somewhere she couldn't see. It happened inside the exact program her committee exists to police.
So what actually draws her attention, you ask? In May 2025, Castor co-signed a letter with Rep. Darren Soto demanding a federal investigation into an alleged $10 million Medicaid diversion, one tied to the Hope Florida Foundation, the nonprofit arm of a state program run by Casey DeSantis, wife of Governor Ron DeSantis. The letter leans directly on Castor's committee seat as the reason she has standing to raise the alarm. More than a year later, that alarm has produced exactly zero charges.
She did eventually speak up about fraud closer to home, but the timing tells its own story. A federal prosecutor working a $100 million-plus fraud case out of St. Petersburg got removed from his post, and Castor sent a letter demanding his reinstatement. She was right to send it. But she only sent it after he'd already been fired, and the letter itself was built around defending him from political retaliation, not around sounding any alarm on the underlying fraud. There's still no record anywhere of her raising that same kind of alarm, unprompted, about the fraud sitting inside her own district, the fraud her committee seat exists specifically to catch.
She has the seat. She has the authority. She used both, loudly, against the DeSantis administration two hundred miles away in Tallahassee. Meanwhile, closer to home, for a decade and a half, the record shows nothing that looks like her raising it first.
One more name belongs in this story, because it touches the same program from the other direction. State Rep. Mike Beltran, now the Republican nominee running to unseat Castor. He cast the lone "no" vote in the Florida House against the 2024 "Live Healthy" package, a bill carrying hundreds of millions of dollars in Medicaid rate increases. His vote didn't stop it. The bill passed anyway. But when every other vote in that chamber said yes to spending more, his was the one on record asking whether the spending held up first. Whatever you make of the politics, that's a documented instance of someone checking where the money goes before it's spent. Not after $126 million of it turns up missing.
Seventeen years is a long run to hold that seat. It exists to watch for exactly this type of thing. The record shows what Castor did on her watch, and what she didn't. If you're asking my opinion, that record looks like someone more concerned with playing politics than taking care of her own district. But that's my read. You be the judge.
Coming in Part 2: another of Castor's committee assignments that put her in direct contact with a company, and a financial relationship the disclosure forms don't fully explain.