Amanda Tom faced the front entrance of Arizona’s Medicaid agency in downtown Phoenix and got emotional as she used a bullhorn to speak about the toll that a massive fraud crisis has had on Indigenous people.
“We trusted you,” said Tom, a Navajo, Phoenix resident and member of the American Indian Movement’s Phoenix chapter. “This is another form of genocide. This is not OK.”
Tom joined about 15 other Indigenous people on a two-mile walk Friday morning from the Arizona Department of Health Services, 150 N. 18th Ave., to Arizona’s Medicaid agency, which is called the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System, or AHCCCS (pronounced ‘access’), to bring attention to the damage that major Arizona Medicaid fraud has caused to Indigenous communities across the country.
The marchers wanted to highlight a 232-page class action lawsuit filed last week in Maricopa County Superior Court on behalf of an estimated 7,000 Native people and their families who, according to the lawsuit, have died, been injured or been forced into homelessness as a result of phony treatment centers that purported to help them overcome substance use disorders.