AND THEY WONDER WHY WE HAVE A DEFICIT

Last week it was reported in the New York Post that over 30,000 former New York residents may have improperly collected millions in NY Medicaid payments while being registered in other states' Medicaid programs.

And what is being done?

You guessed it another audit.

New York state's Medicaid Inspector General James Sheehan has ordered his staff to investigate the claims of the former residents.

Here are a few questions for the Inspector General;

Why were former NY residents even allowed to apply for NY Medicaid benefits?

Isn't there a process in place to validate a recipients address?

If not is a process going to be implemented?

Who is going to handle the current workload if your staff needs to review all of these past payments?

What if anything is going to be done to those found to have improperly received these funds?

This is just another example of why we have such a deficit and why nothing gets done.

We will spend hundreds of hours on this review and what will we get.

An audit report and a huge overtime bill from the Medicaid staff.

What's worse is nothing will come of the report and no one will be held responsible for improperly receiving the funds or allowing it to happen.

That's the problem with the system.

There is little or no oversight and it takes a newspaper report to get them to do anything.

If they want to do an audit here is a suggestion.

Do an audit of the cost of all of the past city and state audits compared to what was actually recovered as a result of the audits.

Guarantee that you will need your red pen to post that result.

What makes matters even worse is that it is extremely rare when any audit recommendations are even implemented.

But that is business as usual when it comes to government.

And they wonder why we have a deficit.