The State Senate has started work on a major effort to reduce Medicaid fraud. Last year, when the Legislature and the Governor cut services to tens of thousands of Medicaid recipients, critics complained they were targeting the wrong people in an effort to save money. 95 percent of Medicaid fraud comes from service suppliers, they said. Now, Senator Chris Koster of Harrisonville agrees and he has the figures from the federal government to prove it. He says the unit that monitors the billing of Medicaid payments missed more than 75,000 of those claims – claims for almost three-thousand corpses. It’s a $6-Billion program. Koster says that even if only five percent of that money is fraudulently taken, that amount still is equal to 40 percent of the state’s budget for higher education. Discussion has barely begun on his proposal, which creates stiff new penalties for defrauding Medicaid.
