New York Medicaid Fraud May Reach Into Billions | NYT | 7.18.05
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.…
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.…
The Executives
Among the biggest beneficiaries of the Medicaid program have been executives of the state’s nursing homes and clinics, many of whom earn substantial salaries and profits from the program.
According to records obtained from the Health Department under the Freedom of Information Law, 70 executives of nursing homes and clinics personally made more than $500,000 in 2002, the last year for which figures are available. Twenty-five executives made more than $1 million.…
Kudos Dr. Dolly 29, seconds per procedure…
Healthcare fraud, got some? Rampant, pervasive, and just the beginning…