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EX-NYERS RIPPING OFF MEDICAID MILLIONS
ALBANY - New York is wasting tens of millions of dollars annually by paying the medical expenses of thousands of former residents who have long since moved out of state, an explosive new audit has found.

The scathing - and still-secret - audit determined that nearly 30,000 people in New York City alone were improperly on the state's Medicaid rolls from November 2006 to November 2007, even while they were enrolled in the Medicaid programs of other states.

Auditors from state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli's office, using federally developed computerized record checks in 44 states, determined that nearly 13,000 of the former city residents "should have been investigated" for violation of New York's Medicaid regulations, according to the audit, a copy of which was obtained by The Post.

It's not clear why the other 17,000 out-of-staters were not identified as targets for a probe. ...

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New York Medicaid Fraud May Reach Into Billions
...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.

That generosity was born of good intentions when Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller signed the program into law in 1966, following the state's tradition of creating big antipoverty programs. But Medicaid has become far more than the child of that altruism, having morphed into an economic engine that fuels one of the state's biggest industries, leaving fraud and unnecessary spending to grow in its wake.

There are no precise estimates for the cost to the state's program. Officials who have spent their careers chasing unscrupulous doctors and other providers in New York Medicaid say the losses to taxpayers here are probably higher than typical estimates of overall health care fraud. The Government Accountability Office in Washington and others have estimated that 10 percent of all health care spending nationally is lost to "fraud and abuse."

James Mehmet, who retired in 2001 as chief state investigator of Medicaid fraud and abuse in New York City, said he and his colleagues believed that at least 10 percent of state Medicaid dollars were spent on fraudulent claims, while 20 or 30 percent more were siphoned off by what they termed abuse, meaning unnecessary spending that might not be criminal. "So we're talking about 40 percent of all claims are questionable," Mr. Mehmet said - an amount that would approach $18 billion a year.

Despite the debate, and the enormous sums at stake, Albany has never formally studied how much of the huge government investment in Medicaid is lost to criminal activity and abuse. ...