A quick and easy way to stop Medicaid fraud

Medicaid has been plagued with fraud for decades. But recent revelations indicate that the fraud isn’t just widespread — it is rampant.

Fortunately, there is a way to stop the fraud, and it is one that Republicans have been proposing for decades.

Recent news stories have uncovered Medicaid fraud rings in Minnesota and California that have been scamming billions of taxpayer dollars, enriching the fraudsters at a time when the federal debt is exploding and millions of average Americans are financially struggling.

Politicians and health care bureaucrats at the federal, state and local levels have long known there’s a problem. The New York Times ran a revealing series of articles 20 years ago exposing Medicaid fraud. Here are some of its findings:

Dr. Dolly Rosen, a dentist operating out of a Brooklyn storefront, “claimed to have performed as many as 991 procedures a day in 2003.” She simply “invented” the services she claimed to have provided.

“One [nursing home] operator took in $1.5 million in salary and profit in the same year he was fined for neglecting the home’s residents.”

“[C]riminal rings … duped the program into paying for an expensive muscle-building drug intended for AIDS patients that was then diverted to bodybuilders.” One doctor prescribed $11.5 million worth of the drug.

Sheryl Carswell added 4,434 special education students to the Medicaid rolls in a single day “by recommending that they receive speech therapy” en masse. She had examined only a handful of them to see if they actually needed the therapy.

The Minnesota and California Medicaid fraud rings may be some the most........

© The Hill