Evidently, there’s fraud in Medicaid.
The following are excerpts from an article in today’s Wall Street Journal. See if you can spot the fraud lobby:
Read the rest of this post →In 2011, New York charged [Medicaid] a per-diem rate of $5,118 for residents of the [state-run] institutions, a network of 11 centers that now house about 1,300 people with severe developmental disabilities. Over the course of a year, Medicaid spends $1.9 million for every resident, or $2.5 billion in total—with half coming from the federal government. But the cost of running the institutions is only a quarter of that amount.
[A congressional] report said New York took advantage of a complex formula and kept federal officials in the dark for years…
The committee’s report said Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration refused to cooperate with the investigation. Joshua Vlasto, a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo, said the report’s conclusions were “wrong and totally misleading” and that a threatened “precipitous reduction” in funding would jeopardize administration efforts to modernize and restructure its Medicaid program…
But at a Thursday hearing, Penny Thompson, a CMS deputy director, suggested…, “You can expect to see a rate that’s about one-fifth of its current level” … without specifying a time frame. Such a reduction would reduce the annual federal reimbursement by about $1 billion, punching a hole in New York’s $54 billion Medicaid program…