Last week, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz sent an eight-page letter to Gov. Hochul and other New York officials informing them of an inquiry into the state’s $90 billion in Medicaid spending.

Of course, it’s an obvious Trump partisan administration attack on a Democratic state, but Medicaid in New York State is a huge mess and has been so forever. It spends far more than it should and it gets results that should be better.

While he was sent by the White House to be a hatchet man, Oz, a cardiothoracic surgeon, should use a scalpel with care, conducting a real, legitimate probe that seeks ways to save money for taxpayers and improve outcomes for patients.

He posed 50 detailed questions and has requested a response by April 2, 30 days. That timeline is arbitrary, and the motivation is certainly political, but Medicaid here deserves a thorough examination for fraud, waste and abuse, so endemic to the program that it has the acronym FWA.

The problems weren’t created by Hochul and go back to when Nelson Rockefeller was governor in the 1960s and Congress first created Medicaid and New York Republicans were in control of every branch of state government. It’s been a bipartisan tradition in Albany ever since to milk Medicaid for every possible cent from Uncle Sam.

New York’s average Medicaid spending per resident is the highest in the country, 80% higher than the national average. With the feds paying 50 cents on the dollar and New York paying the other half, it’s an issue for both Washington and Albany.

There is real Medicaid fraud, but waste and abuse are the far larger problems with the program that provides health care for the poor.

One area of focus will be home health care. It lets patients stay in their own homes, which is better for them and in theory it should also be better for taxpayers. New York has just shifted its home health care middleman to a single company, supposedly streamlining the process and saving money. Or at least that was the goal.

If Oz can put aside the politics and the pressure from the White House to “deliver the goods” to blame Democrats, we would welcome an even-handed effort to determine why New York spends so much on these services and still gets relatively subpar results.

There is nothing inherently wrong with higher-than-average spending, insofar as New York has determined to cover more preventive care that can, in the long run, keep people out of emergency rooms, for example. In the end, someone always ends up paying for necessary health care in some form or another. Still, there’s obvious bloat that we can tackle, not only to keep costs down but to actually deliver better services for New Yorkers.

The truth is probably far more pedestrian than shadowy groups of committed fraudsters; really, what we’re looking at is a problem of inertia and general mismanagement of the sort that our political leaders often don’t feel much incentive to address. This is not what Oz was sent here to find, but if he can put aside what Donald Trump wants, he can actually do some good.

© NY Daily News