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Cuomo: Subpoenas part of wider health agency probe
BY CAROLYN THOMPSON The Associated Press

    BUFFALO — Twenty-seven upstate home health care agencies face questions from the state about aides who provide services paid for by Medicaid.
    Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said a round of subpoenas sent by his office this week are part of a widening Medicaid probe that began with reports of fraud downstate last year.
    The investigation has so far led to charges against more than 80 patients, aides, nurses, instructors and administrators of home health agencies, 50 convictions and judgments to pay more than $14 million in restitution, the attorney general said.
    “We had nurses who never showed up, we had nurses who showed up and abused the patient. We have cases of nurses who overbill to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Cuomo said during a news conference in his Buffalo offi ce.
    “Older New Yorkers overwhelmingly prefer to receive long-term care services for themselves or a family member through home care and community-based services rather than institutional care,” said Lois Aronstein, the director of AARP in New York.
    The result is an expanding industry in need of more thorough oversight, Cuomo said. More than 150,000 New Yorkers receive Medicaid-funded home health services monthly. The bill to taxpayers in 2007 was $3.8 billion, he said.
    “The concept is right,” Cuomo said. “We want to clean up the fraud.”
    The investigation targets not only the aides who provide the services, but the agencies that hire, train and contract them out.
    The president of the Home Care Association of New York supported the effort to prosecute those who undermine the system but cautioned against allowing a “broadbrush approach” to impair those trying to deliver quality care.
    “Providers of quality home care services have an equal, if not greater, stake in curbing fraud and abuse,” HCA President Joanne Cunningham said, “because the misdeeds of a few rogue individuals have the potential to tarnish the entire home care community.”
    Cuomo pointed to the arrest of an employment recruiter for an inhome health care training company in Buffalo for selling falsifi ed personal care aide certificates. Melody McKnight pleaded guilty to forgery and bribery charges.
    In a Rochester case, nurse Adrian Clements admitted filing reimbursement claims for services that she did not provide, receiving $70,785 from the Medicaid program. She was sentenced to fi ve years probation and ordered to repay the money.
    Other recent cases have exposed aides working without proper training, no-show aides who split their payments with complicit patients and aides billing multiple agencies for 36 hours in a single day.
    Of the subpoenas issued this week, 15 went to Syracuse-area agencies, while agencies in Buffalo and Rochester received seven and five, respectively. Cuomo said the targeted companies are not accused of wrongdoing, but that investigation has warranted giving them a closer look.
    Cuomo is also pushing for a statewide registry of certifi ed home health aides as a way to better oversee the industry.     

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“Older New Yorkers overwhelmingly prefer to receive long-term care services for themselves or a family member through home care and community-based services rather than institutional care,” said Lois Aronstein, the director of AARP in New York.

Told you AARP would solve the social security solvency issue----that is until the taxpayers think that 75years old is too old to 'give' services.......

we dont even know how to manage the medicaid beast....and frankly----never will......it is the Alaskan Pipeline and all it's issues......