Fraud and Waste: The Other White Meat NY Edition

Last week, for example, federal auditors reportedly found some $200 million in inappropriate transportation billings by the New York City school system.

Earlier, federal audits demanded some $435 million for improper speech-therapy claims by city schools and another $172 million for upstate schools.

Last month, upstate Rep. John Sweeney and state Senate Deputy Majority Leader Dean Skelos announced that they'd gotten the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to take a look at the state Department of Health's Office of Medicaid Management.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' inspector general is probing Spitzer's own Medicaid Fraud Control Unit.

Maybe all this excitement got the AG's attention. Thus, his latest "triumphs":

* A Long Island nurse pleaded guilty to bilking Medicaid out of $550,000 for services she never provided.

* A Westchester taxi-fleet owner admitted billing for hundreds of phony rides and agreed to repay $400,000.

* The Terence Cardinal Cooke Health Care Center in Manhattan said it would return some $2.3 million in payments made — allegedly because of a computer glitch — for services delivered to patients who were dead at the time.

* A medical-equipment supplier agreed to hand back $239,000 it took for selling used devices as new.

* And the AG is suing an Erie County nursing home for $1 million in improperly calculated payments, though the facility says the state owes it money.

Spitzer claims the recoveries will add to the more than $200 million collected by his office this year.

But the newspaper exposé cited above — a 9,000-word series in The New York Times last summer — suggested that as much as $18 billion a year is being lost to fraud, waste and abuse.

Let's see. We hear about how much debt New York has accumulated and yet no one seems the least bit interested in getting the spiraling costs under control. We hear about porkbarrel projects throughout the country that include boondoggles and projects of dubious merit. Now, we know that there are people who were entrusted with investigating and making sure that fraud and abuse are ferreted out are themselves under investigation.

And did I mention that the head of the office involved, NY Attorney General Eliot Spitzer is the leading candidate for New York Governor?

It is well past time to clean up the waste and fraud in the New York Medicaid system. The voters need to demand this and send a message to the elected officials that they can no longer tolerate bloated budgets that are overextended because of the waste and fraud built into the system.



Technorati: porkbusters; waste; and fraud.