Trump Administration Warns States To Combat Medicaid Fraud or Lose Funding

Vice President Vance is warning every state to get serious in their fight against Medicaid fraud or face a possible loss of some federal funding.Mr. Vance announced Wednesday that letters are going to each state to require that they show they are “effectively and aggressively” prosecuting Medicaid fraud.President Trump in March tasked Mr. Vance to head up a task force to uncover and eliminate fraud involving federal tax dollars. An early target has been widespread abuse involving health care payments. Mr. Vance says there is fraud in both Democrat and Republican states but some blue states have done little to fight fraud“We’re going to very aggressively encourage the states to take Medicare fraud more seriously,” Mr. Vance said at a Washington, D.C. news conference. He said the administration will cut off anti-fraud unit funding to any state that is not effectively combatting abuse. He says the federal government will use the money to carry out its own investigations.Every state has a Medicaid Fraud Control Unit that is tasked with uncovering abuse. To show how “absurd” some of the state-level fraud units are, Mr. Vance pointed to Hawaii’s unit. He said the state has received billions of federal Medicaid dollars but hasn’t had a single fraud indictment or conviction in the past several years.The Trump administration has suspended payments to many hospice services in California due to high fraud rates. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator, Dr. Memet Oz, said that reimbursement payments were shut down to 800 registered hospices in the state. He says only about 40 of them have contacted the government about the stopped payments — indicating they were just fronts used for fraud.Dr. Oz says the fraudsters are moving to nearby states to continue their scams, so he announced a six-month nationwide moratorium on new Medicare hospice and home health agency enrollment licenses. He says the pause will allow a better system to be put in place to stop bad actors from entering the system.“A brief moratorium gives the administration time to crack down on true fraud and prevent new fraudulent entities from popping up,” a senior vice president at the health care research nonprofit KFF told the Associated Press.The pause does not stop payments to currently operating providers, but there will be heightened oversight of newly enrolled Medicare hospice providers in states that have been identified as having an elevated fraud risk, including Arizona, California, Georgia, Ohio, Nevada, and Texas.“Half of the fraud, we believe, in the federal government could be coming out of healthcare services,” Dr. Memet Oz, said. “We’re a large rhino that can be stabbed effortlessly by foreign governments.”The White House anti-fraud task force has already withheld $1.4 billion in payments to hospice and home health care providers nationwide over fraud concernsThat could be just the tip of the iceberg. Dr. Oz estimates that there could be $100 billion in estimated theft from Medicare and Medicaid.

Trump Administration Warns States To Combat Medicaid Fraud or Lose Funding

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