A scathing audit has uncovered more than a billion dollars in Medicaid waste tied to out-of-state payments and mismanagement by New York’s Department of Health.
Assembly Minority Leader Will Barclay called it “another example of New York being its own worst enemy.”
How the errors happened
According to the state comptroller’s office, the Department of Health mistakenly paid $1.2 billion to managed care providers on behalf of people no longer living in New York.
The mistake could have been avoided, the report says, if DOH had used a federal system designed to detect double payments across state lines. But that system—called the Public Assistance Reporting Information System—wasn’t used until after most of the improper payments had already gone out.
The audit also found the state failed to remove people from Medicaid who were eligible for Medicare, leading to another $294 million in wasted spending.
“These are not rounding errors,” Barclay wrote in a public column Friday. “These mistakes are costing New Yorkers billions of dollars at a time when every dollar matters.”
Call for accountability
Barclay said the size and scope of the errors raise serious concerns about oversight and basic accountability.
“It’s no secret New York has faced myriad waste and fraud issues in recent years,” he said, “but the sheer magnitude of these errors threatens to further damage our already fragile health care system.”
The Department of Health has not publicly responded to the audit’s findings.
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