Cornyn: Obamacare Expands Medicaid Program Wrought With Waste, Fraud & Abuse
Press Release
U.S. Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas), member of the Senate Finance Committee, today offered an amendment to the Health Care Reconciliation bill (H.R. 4872) to provide individual states with incentives to reduce fraud, waste, and abuse in their Medicaid programs. The amendment was defeated along party lines.
"The $3.4 trillion federal taxpayers spend on the Medicaid program is a target for waste, fraud, and abuse," said Sen. Cornyn. "Instead of fixing these problems, the President's new health care overhaul includes the largest expansion of the broken Medicaid program since its creation in 1965: it's only going to get worse from here. This amendment would have given states with excessive improper payment rates financial incentives to better manage their programs--saving taxpayer dollars by reducing waste and fraud."
According to data from the Department of Health and Human Services, improper payment rates average between 8.7 and 10.5 percent--and in Washington, D.C., one out of every five Medicaid dollars is improperly spent. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has repeatedly labeled Medicaid as a "high risk" program because it is plagued by fraud. A recent report in the New York Times uncovered that the New York Medicaid program had reimbursed a dentist who billed Medicaid for 991 procedures in one day.
Instead of stopping the waste, fraud, and abuse associated with Medicaid, President Obama's health care overhaul expands the program by $434 billion over just the first 6 years. Sen. Cornyn's amendment would have given states an incentive to fight fraudulent and questionable payments. Specifically, the amendment would have reduced the federal Medicaid match by a small one percentage point to any state for which the payment error rate measurement is in excess of 10 percent, beginning in 2014. Since the Medicaid expansions in the health care bill do not go into effect until 2014, Sen. Cornyn's amendment would give states plenty of time to reform their programs before the one percent penalty starts. Unfortunately, Senate Democrats voted to defeat the amendment by a vote of 57-41 with only one Democrat crossing party lines to fight fraud in Medicaid.
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