chanel
Silver Member
A year after a congressional audit exposed exorbitant fraud and abuse in the federal governments insurance program for the poor, the Justice Department is suing New York City for cheating it out of tens of millions of dollars in the last decade.
Corruption in the Medicaid program is nothing new but the complaint, filed this week by the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan, indicates the problem is much worst than previously reported. Federal authorities claim that nearly 18,000 people in the city received costly, taxpayer-financed personal care services that should not have been covered or werent medically necessary.
The government was billed between $75,000 to $150,000 a year for the special services that include 24-hour aides that help with housecleaning, shopping, bathing and other personal needs.
About a year ago a congressional report included New York as one of five states with the highest rate of Medicaid fraud. During a two-year investigation, 65,000 instances of prescription fraud cost U.S. taxpayers about $65 million in the top five states alone. An additional $2.3 million went to practitioners and pharmacies banned from federal health care programs, nearly 2,000 prescriptions were written for dead patients and 1,200 prescriptions were written by dead doctors.
New York's Medicaid system is the largest and most expensive (around $48 billion annually) in the nation because it extends benefits to the middle class and allows excessive use of certain costly services that arent always related to medical care.
Additionally, the states Medicaid program has been cheated by several criminal rings that duped it into paying tens of millions of dollars to give bodybuilders a costly muscle-building drug intended for AIDS patients and to provide Viagra for hundreds of sex offenders. Some may wonder what took the feds so long to take action.
Feds Sue N.Y. For Millions In Medicaid Fraud | Judicial Watch
What a system.