Honey Pot

"New York's Medicaid program is by far the most expensive and most generous in the nation. It spends far more - now $44.5 billion annually - than that of any other state...." And is it ripe for the picking. NYTimes (07.18.05):

"It was created 40 years ago to provide health care for the poorest New Yorkers, offering a lifeline to those who could not afford to have a baby or a heart attack. But in the decades since, New York State's Medicaid program has also become a $44.5 billion target for the unscrupulous and the opportunistic." New York Medicaid Fraud May Reach Into Billions

Lots of examples: Dr. Dolly Rosen, a dentist "who within 12 months somehow built the state's biggest Medicaid dental practice out of a Brooklyn storefront, where she claimed to have performed as many as 991 procedures a day in 2003." Van services supposedly for folks who can't walk unaided, "that regularly picked up scores of people who walked quite easily when a reporter was watching nearby." At $50 a round trip, the Times figures this added up "to $200 million a year. In some cases, the rides that the state paid for may never have taken place." School districts enrolling "tens of thousands of low-income students in speech therapy" without evaluating them. Brought in more than $1 billion. "One Buffalo school official sent 4,434 students into speech therapy in a single day without talking to them or reviewing their records, according to federal investigators." "Nursing home operators have received substantial salaries and profits from Medicaid payments, while keeping staffing levels below the national average. One operator took in $1.5 million in salary and profit in the same year he was fined for neglecting the home's residents." "Medicaid has even drawn several criminal rings that duped the program into paying for an expensive muscle-building drug intended for AIDS patients that was then diverted to bodybuilders, at a cost of tens of millions. A single doctor in Brooklyn prescribed $11.5 million worth of the drug, the vast majority of it after the state said it had tightened rules for covering the drug." "'It's like a honey pot,' said John M. Meekins, a former senior Medicaid fraud prosecutor in Albany who said he grew increasingly disillusioned before he retired in 2003. 'It truly is. That is what they use it for.'" No it isn't, say state health officials, who claim "they were doing an excellent job of overseeing the program." Huh. Guess excellent might not be good enough.