Feds plan to ask all 50 states to audit Medicaid providers

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz said Tuesday that his agency this week would ask all 50 states to present a strategy for how they would revalidate Medicaid providers in practices deemed high risks for fraud. He would give state governments one month to do so, he said during a Politico summit. If any states didn’t take the order seriously, his agency might push for more aggressive audits there, he said, though he did not indicate who would conduct the audits.

It was not immediately clear whether the initiative was part of the Trump administration’s recently-formed anti-fraud task force, which is headed up by Vice President J.D. Vance. The two worked together in February to announce that the government was deferring $259.5 million in payments to Minnesota until the state performed an audit to validate service providers there. Oz on Tuesday said his agency had also shut down Medicaid reimbursements to roughly 450 home healthcare centers, mainly hospices, in California. State officials there recently arrested five people for an alleged $267 million fraud scheme.

Wasn't there an issue with a recent evaluation of Medicaid in New York? The announcement also comes just over two weeks after Oz’s agency admitted to the Associated Press that it made a major error when stating figures of estimated fraud in New York. The number of people signed up for Medicaid-funded personal care services was around 450,000, not 5 million as originally stated, the agency said. The agency misinterpreted New York’s billing codes, it said.

Dig deeper: Read Liz Lykins’ report on California’s bust of alleged hospice fraudsters.