NY’s $124B Medicaid spending is BLATANTLY full of – Latest News
Dr. Mehmet Oz, the federal Medicaid chief, is completely proper to probe New York’s bloated $124 billion spending on this system.
Cost controls and fraud prevention are anathema to the state’s political institution and the chief of that institution, Gov. Kathy Hochul, deserves the heat.
As properly because the scrutiny of a House investigation into Medicaid fraud in 10 states, together with New York and California.
New York’s gargantuan health program is far too fats to not be a prime goal for scammers: The state supplies free health protection to properly over a third of its population (the national average is nearer to a fifth), and highly effective particular pursuits — unions in addition to the hospital industry and “social service”-based political machines — scream on the mere suggestion that a dime of it is wasted or stolen.
Hochul will point out “bad actors in the Medicaid program,” however her actions to establish and forestall fraud are fairly murky.
In current months, the Justice Department uncovered legal fraud within the grownup day care and personal care program (the place Medicaid has seen explosive growth); in January, two Brooklyn fraudsters pleaded guilty to scamming $68 million in an adult-care fraud scheme.
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And Oz’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services flagged a 121% leap in spending (presumably $196 million in fraud) on non-medical transportation companies earlier this yr.
“These cases expose ongoing program integrity vulnerabilities within the New York state Medicaid program and home and community-based service delivery system,” Oz notes.
The feds are ramping up enforcement by way of CMS’s Comprehensive Regulations to Uncover Suspicious Healthcare (CRUSH) initiative and the Justice Department’s new Division for National Fraud Enforcement.
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Also below the microscope: Hochul’s choice to (supposedly) rein in hovering Medicaid funds below the Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program by hiring exterior contractor Public Partnerships LLC to handle funds to care staff.
Not solely has that backfired by permitting monster union 1199 to enroll these staff and inevitably begin lobbying for giant pay hikes, the selection of PPL itself — after the opposite states give up working with the company for trigger — is trying corrupt.
Solidly liberal, high-cost Massachusetts spends about $3,500 per capita on Medicaid; New York state, $6,200 — with no superior health outcomes of any sort.
So the Empire State would spend $50 billion much less if merely matched the Medicaid requirements of “the people’s republic of Taxachusetts”: That’s an terrible lot of money going for issues different than protecting the health-care wants of the poor.
