"...No wonder The (W)itch likes New York so much - it's just like her Insider Commodities Trading game..............
New York Medicaid Fraud May Reach Into Billions
By CLIFFORD J. LEVY and MICHAEL LUO Published: July 18, 2005
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.
It has drawn dentists like Dr. Dolly Rosen, 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. After The New York Times discovered her extraordinary billings through a computer analysis and questioned the state about them, Dr. Rosen and two associates were indicted on charges of stealing more than $1 million from the program.
It has drawn van services, intended as medical transportation for patients who cannot walk unaided, that regularly picked up scores of people who walked quite easily when a reporter was watching nearby. In cooperation with medical offices that order these services, the ambulettes typically cost the taxpayers more than $50 a round trip, adding up to $200 million a year. In some cases, the rides that the state paid for may never have taken place.
School officials around the state have enrolled tens of thousands of low-income students in speech therapy without the required evaluation, garnering more than $1 billion in questionable Medicaid payments for their districts. 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.
New York's Medicaid program, once a beacon of the Great Society era, has become so huge, so complex and so lightly policed that it is easily exploited. Though the program is a vital resource for 4.2 million poor people who rely on it for their health care, a yearlong investigation by The Times found that the program has been misspending billions of dollars annually because of fraud, waste and profiteering. A computer analysis of several million records obtained under the state Freedom of Information Law revealed numerous indications of fraud and abuse that the state had never looked into.
"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."
State health officials denied in interviews that Medicaid was easily cheated, saying that they were doing an excellent job of overseeing the program.
"This continues to be an area where we think that we have made substantial progress," said Dennis P. Whalen, executive deputy commissioner of the State Health Department. "But by no means are we sitting back and resting on the accomplishments that we have made."
Nonetheless, after being informed of The Times's findings, the Republican majority in the State Senate began a push recently to overhaul the system intended to protect Medicaid, which has been sharply reduced even as Gov. George E. Pataki and lawmakers have nearly doubled the program's budget over the last decade. The Democratic majority in the Assembly has remained on the sidelines. So has Mr. Pataki.
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, even California, whose Medicaid program covers about 55 percent more people. New York's Medicaid budget is larger than most states' entire budgets, and it spends nearly twice the national average - roughly $10,600, more than any other state - on each of its 4.2 million recipients, one in every five New Yorkers.
nytimes.com
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