Medicaid and other state programs face questions about fraud, other difficulties

The New Mexico Independent: The state's Medicaid Fraud Division said two state agencies, the Health Department and Human Services Department that administer the Medicaid program, "'filtered' and 'sanitized' information and documents requested by investigators, hindering numerous investigations." The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services wil investigate the allegations (Furlow, 2/10).

Anchorage Daily News: "An Alaska mental health advocacy group that has spent years battling the pharmaceutical industry over medication is suing more than a dozen Alaska child psychiatrists, saying the doctors unnecessarily drugged children and committed Medicaid fraud" (Holland, 2/10).

Deseret (Salt Lake City) News: "An audit of state insurance programs for children and the poor that at first glance might have looked like a $13.7 million stash of fraud that revenue-strapped lawmakers could recoup is mostly a product of incomplete eligibility checking by the state." The audit examined Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program. It found that 24 percent of CHIP spending was on patients who are not actually qualified to received CHIP coverage. Many, however, would be eligible for the separate Medicaid program, one of the auditors said (Thalman, 2/10).

Claims Journal: "The Wyoming Department of Health says the personal information of about 9,000 children in the state's children's health insurance program could have been exposed on the Internet" (2/11).

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This article was reprinted from khn.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.