In Flushing, Queens, there's a storefront where elderly Korean and Chinese residents play ping pong and do tai chi. It bills itself as a social adult daycare. It bills New York Medicaid for the privilege of existing. And according to investigative reporter Nick Shirley, who showed up with cameras rolling, it's part of a $190 million fraud network that nobody in state government bothered to investigate.
A guy with a YouTube channel found it. The state of New York did not.
Shirley released a 53-minute video this month documenting what he and his crew uncovered across New York City — a web of personal home care and social adult daycare operations exploiting taxpayer-funded Medicaid programs. The report walks through facility after facility where the same pattern repeats: storefronts collecting public dollars for services that don't match what's actually happening inside.
"Your tax dollars are paying for elderly Koreans and Chinese to play ping pong and do tai chi," Shirley said in the video, standing outside one of the facilities in Queens. "Nobody speaks English here. Our tax dollars are going to places like these."
The numbers get worse the deeper you look. Dr. Oz, who partnered with Shirley on the investigation, noted that social adult daycares nationwide "have generated $2.5 billion" over the last three years. Of that $2.5 billion, a staggering $2.1 billion came from Queens alone.
Read that ratio again. One borough in one city accounts for 84% of all social adult daycare billing in the country. Queens isn't home to 84% of America's elderly population. It's not even close. But it is home to a concentration of operators who figured out that Medicaid reimbursement is essentially an honor system — and nobody's checking the honors.
"These fraudsters have been able to defraud American taxpayers for years without any pushback," Shirley said. "We ALL work way too hard and pay too much in taxes for fraudsters to steal from our pockets."
New York's response to all of this has been approximately nothing. The state has an entire Medicaid Fraud Control Unit — one that just had its federal funding frozen over what the feds called ineffective enforcement. That's not a coincidence. It's hard to enforce fraud when the fraud is functionally baked into the system.
New York officials will tell you they take Medicaid integrity seriously. They'll point to their oversight mechanisms, their compliance frameworks, their dedicated investigators. What they won't explain is how $2.1 billion in daycare billing from a single borough didn't trigger a single red flag in Albany. The paperwork exists. The billing records exist. The addresses exist. Someone chose not to look.
This is the same state apparatus that found the resources to pursue civil fraud cases against Donald Trump's real estate valuations. The same attorney general's office that held press conferences about the former president's financial statements. Somehow the bandwidth existed for that. But $190 million in Medicaid theft from programs meant to serve the elderly and the vulnerable? That required a freelance journalist with a camera crew to discover.
Shirley isn't a federal agent. He doesn't have subpoena power. He walked into these facilities, asked basic questions, and documented what he saw. The fact that his 53-minute video contains more actionable evidence of fraud than anything Albany has produced tells you everything about where the state's priorities actually sit.
The fraud pipeline works like this: operators set up storefronts in areas with large immigrant populations, bill Medicaid for personal home care or adult daycare services, and collect reimbursements that dwarf what any legitimate operation would generate. The patients may or may not exist. The services may or may not be rendered. The checks clear either way.
New York spent $2.1 billion on adult daycare in Queens over three years. The entire rest of the country spent $400 million. Either Queens has a geriatric care crisis unlike anything in American history, or someone is stealing.