Eliot Spitzer has discovered the importance of cracking down on Medicaid fraud, but instead of launching more vigorous enforcement efforts he’s merely trying to take credit for the heavy lifting that others have already done. Witness a press release issued Tuesday on his official Web site touting the record amount of money he claims to have recovered from “wrongdoers” in 2005. The total hit $2.8 billion, including $273.5 million raked in by the Medicaid Fraud Control Unit, a stunning increase over the previous record for Medicaid fraud recoveries, $62.5 million, set in 2004.

If that seems like good news, it’s not something for which Mr. Spitzer can claim all the credit, as his gubernatorial primary opponent, Thomas Suozzi, was only too happy to note yesterday. Mr. Suozzi pointed out that $171 million of that money in 2005 came from a large, multi-state case spearheaded by the federal Department of Justice. In other words, the Bush administration was the lead player in the case that brought in 63% of the Medicaid fraud recoveries for which Mr. Spitzer’s press release now claims credit. Meantime, Mr. Spitzer’s office has a record of spending nearly as much investigating fraud as it ever recovers, compared to states like California or Texas that gain back two or four times as much as they spend.

As the attorney general discloses in a report filed to the Department of Health and Human Services, that $171 million came from the Serono settlement, a case in which a pharmaceutical company pleaded guilty to improperly marketing an AIDS drug. The settlement was split between the federal government and 40 states. Lawyers in Mr. Spitzer’s Medicaid unit played an important role in pursuing the investigation, but that’s the norm in such cases. A spokesman for the Department of Justice, Charles Miller, tells us that local officials almost always take the lead in gathering evidence in their own backyards before handing cases off to federal prosecutors. It wasn’t Mr. Spitzer who spotted the fraud; the case started with a tip from a Serono employee in Massachusetts.

If New York taxpayers were defrauded to the tune of $171 million in the Serono case, kudos for Mr. Spitzer for helping to get that money back, even though the boasts in his press release may be a bit exaggerated. Fraud eats up between 10% and 40% of the state’s $46 billion Medicaid program. But fraud isn’t the only problem. While both candidates are fighting about who is or isn’t doing the best job pursuing fraud cases, New Yorkers are still waiting to hear what they will do about the far bigger scandal – the Medicaid monies that are spent legally but wastefully.