State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s war against Medicaid fraud” which he’s been waging with considerable zeal since taking office” continues to pay genuine dividends.
The AG last week reported that his Medicaid Fraud Control Unit in 2008 reached settlements and obtained judgments against Medicaid chiselers in the amount of $263.5 million.
That’s well more than double the $113.8 million his office collected in 2007, Cuomo’s first year on the job” and almost four-and-a-half times the amount his predecessor, Eliot Spitzer, was able to win in his last year in the AG’s office.
Very impressive.
But, sadly, it’s only a drop in the bucket compared to just how much Medicaid fraud is likely out there.
In a landmark series a few years back, The New York Times quoted experts as saying that theft and corruption likely account for between 10 percent and 40 percent of New York’s nearly $50 billion in annual Medicaid spending” by far the most generous of any state.
That comes to between $5 billion and $20 billion in fraud each year.
So Cuomo obviously has a long way to go to recoup a truly significant part of the Medicaid money that’s been thrown out the window over the years.
Still, his efforts have been extraordinary.
In the home-health industry, which he targeted from the get-go, Cuomo has won the convictions of dozens of private-duty nurses who billed Medicaid for services they never performed, as well as corrupt home-health aides and officials.
And he’s collected nearly $30 million in restitution, to boot.
To prevent further fraud” as well as ensuring that dependent New Yorkers get the care they deserve” he got the state Legislature to establish a central registry of home-health and personal-care aides designed to weed out unqualified and untrained workers.
Such diligence would be commendable at any time, but at a time of mounting fiscal deficits, returning ill-gotten gains to the public treasury is vital.
Unfortunately, Medicald remains a target-rich environment” which is why Cuomo can’t let up for one moment.