WASHINGTON—Vice President JD Vance, head of the Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, announced on Wednesday that the federal government is deferring 1.3 billion in Medicaid reimbursements from California over its failure to take fraud “very seriously.”
Vance announced the action during a press conference on Wednesday in the Indian Treaty Room of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House campus.
“First, we’re announcing that the federal government is deferring $1.3 billion in Medicaid reimbursements from the state of California, and the simple reason is because the state of California has not taken fraud very seriously,” Vance said.
Vance added that both taxpayers and patients who are being prescribed medications they do not even need at the behest of fraudsters are victims.
“So there are California taxpayers and American taxpayers who are being defrauded because California isn’t taking its program seriously,” the vice president told reporters. “But also, you have people who have been prescribed medications that they don’t even need. Sometimes they’ve had drugs put into their bodies that they don’t need because fraudsters have actually encouraged false prescriptions and false administration of medications.”
“So think about this. You’re the person trying to go see a doctor. You assume that your doctor is doing the right thing but these fraudulent health care providers are getting rich by giving people medications they don’t even need. It’s a defrauding of the American taxpayer,” he added. “But it’s a violation of the trust that should exist between every American and the people who prescribe the medications. That’s one thing that…we’re targeting, and this is why we’re taking this action, because we want California to get serious about this fraud.”
Vance later noted that the deferments are not withholding benefits, but rather “turning off the resources that… the state government should be using to police fraud, and then instead, we’re gonna use those resources ourselves because we’re actually taking the fraud issue very seriously.”
The move comes after the federal government deferred over $300 million in Medicaid reimbursements from Minnesota.
Vance also noted that the anti-fraud task force is sending letters to all 50 states’ Medicaid programs requiring they demonstarte how they are prosecuting Medicaid fraud.
“If they do not aggressively prosecute Medicaid fraud, we are going to turn off the money that goes to these anti-fraud units,” he said.
As one example, he pointed to Hawaii, where there have been no indictments for Medicaid fraud in recent years.
“Not a single indictment, not a single conviction, because the administrators of the Hawaii program just don’t take it seriously. They don’t think that fraud is a big enough problem. They don’t care about protecting the resources,” he said.
“New York has had nine indictments over the last year, nine indictments,” he went on to add. “That’s a $100 billion Medicaid program just in New York, and you’ve had nine indictments. Indiana, which has about a third of the population of the state of New York, has had more than four times as many indictments over the same period.”