NY Comptroller found $92 million in Medicaid overpayments, error.   State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli announced today that auditors found up to $92 million in Medicaid overpayments, billing errors and other problems. He called on the state Health … Massive Medicaid Fraud Found.

Health officials bungled $92M in Medicaid claims New York Post Comptroller’s office says.  At a time,  state budgets are suffering, federal government is blamed for over extending the financial reach of the government, these types of waste are becoming more important.

Thomas said that what he found is a small portion.

Auditors found about $2million spent on tooth cleaning for people without teeth; about $28 millions were spent on out of state residents.

According to NY Times, in one instance, a Medicaid recipient in Poughkeepsie was provided with $300 round-trip daily taxi service to visit her child in a long-term care facility in Albany, which cost the state roughly $196,000 before the authorization was revoked.  Mr. DiNapoli’s audits on Tuesday cited at least $5.4 million in improper payments to 10 hospitals that had billed for discharging patients who had been transferred to another hospital. Under Medicaid rules, hospitals receive more for discharging patients than for transferring them.

The department said the improper claims highlighted in the audits amount to a tiny fraction of total Medicaid claims, which total tens of billions of dollars a year.

In a statement, Claudia Hutton, a spokeswoman for the department, said that officials there were committed to preventing Medicaid waste, but disputed some of the audits’ conclusions.

The taxi rides were provided to the Poughkeepsie woman, Ms. Hutton said, because her son’s doctor had determined that she should be trained to provide home care for her son after he was released, training that would cost taxpayers less than a professional home health aide.