In a long-overdue action, the federal government is moving to protect taxpayers against systematic fraud in California and Minnesota:
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Tuesday he’s stopping more than $1 billion in federal Medicaid payments to California and Minnesota over suspected fraud.
“We are not sending Medicaid dollars out the door until we have confidence that they are being spent lawfully and appropriately,” Kennedy said at an announcement on Tuesday.
That certainly isn’t happening now.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is deferring over $200 million and over $867 million in federal Medicaid payments for Minnesota and California, respectively. The hold will be in place while federal officers review “high-risk Medicaid claims” and document deficiencies.
In Minnesota, the funding involves 14 high-risk areas that were identified as suspect because of vulnerabilities or evidence of fraudulent activity.
Tim Walz will claim that the feds are depriving poor people of health care, but that isn’t true. The 14 “high risk” programs do not pay doctors or hospitals for providing health care. They cover things like giving advice to homeless people on how they might find housing, at $70 an hour (seriously). These are the 14 Minnesota programs:
In December of last year, Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson told a press conference that of the $18 billion spent on those 14 programs over the past several years, at least half–$9 billion or more–was fraud. In one of the programs, Housing Stabilization Services, investigation by the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office found that it wasn’t clear a single dollar was ever spent properly. The entire program, which has now been shut down, may have been fraudulent.
So don’t pay any attention to the Democrats who will shed faux tears over poor people going without health care. It isn’t going to happen. There is plenty of fraud in Medicaid, much of it committed by doctors, clinics and hospitals, but that isn’t the issue here. What is going on here is a belated effort to close the barn door after billions of dollars have been blatantly stolen by criminals.
What about California?
CMS officials suspect the questionable spending in California is rooted in in-home services. Over the past two federal fiscal years, California’s spending in these programs went up 24%, while the rest of the country’s average was 12%, according to CMS administrator Mehmet Oz.
“So California increased spending at twice the rate of the average of the rest of the entire nation,” Oz said. “That doesn’t make sense.”
The public is fed up with state governments enabling the theft of many billions of dollars in federal taxpayer money, likely as a way of buying the loyalty of political constituencies. Everyone should applaud this relatively small-scale effort by the Trump administration to protect taxpayers.
