Dr. Mehmet Oz came to Minnesota with numbers that should end careers. Speaking at the Vice President’s Fraud Task Force event on Friday, the CMS Administrator revealed what happened when the Trump administration made Minnesota check whether its high-risk Medicaid providers were even allowed to do the work they were billing for.
“We asked Minnesota to revalidate all of the high-risk providers here in Minnesota. Fourteen categories,” Oz said. “Thirty percent, almost one in three of all the people providing services in Minnesota could not be revalidated. I’ll say that again. One in three people, roughly, who are providing services were not allowed to provide services.”
The bar was not high. To pass, Oz explained, providers cannot be convicted felons, must be licensed in the state, have to pass inspections, and cannot have been kicked out of Medicare or Medicaid in the past. Many programs “got out of kilter,” he said, “because unlicensed individuals and unmonitored settings did unmeasured tasks that led to huge increases” in costs paid by taxpayers.
“That degree of fraud, again, you have to purposely be averting your glance to allow that to happen,” Oz said, a direct shot at the state officials who let it grow on their watch. In social adult daycare, 50 percent of Minnesota providers were not allowed to provide the service. Oz asked the bigger question: “Should we be using federal tax dollars to pay people to play mahjong and card games as they hang out in clubhouses for crooks?”
Under President Trump, the days of looking the other way are over. The same day, the FBI announced four more arrests in Minnesota Medicaid fraud cases tied to more than $41 million in intended fraud, and CMS is pushing the same revalidation nationwide.
