New Jersey Doesn’t Care About Welfare Fraud – Like Most Blue States

New Jersey has a fraud problem. And not just in its voter rolls.

New Jersey found thousands of noncitizen registered voters – but hasn’t dealt with Medicaid fraud

By now, everyone in America knows that New Jersey just found 6,600 noncitizens who were illegally registered to vote. About 400 of them illegally cast ballots. But New Jersey has an even worse fraud problem in its welfare programs. New findings from our organization prove it.

Using the state’s open public records act, we asked New Jersey a simple question: How often does it make sure its Medicaid providers are legitimate? We received the answer in August, and it’s disturbing. New Jersey is required by federal law to check, or “revalidate,” its 106,982 Medicaid providers once every five years – at least.

This mandate exists to prevent bad actors from bilking the taxpayer-funded program. If the government doesn’t check regularly, Medicaid providers can bill taxpayers too much – or for services they never even provided. The danger is real. Medicaid fraud and improper payments are expected to cost taxpayers $2 trillion over the next decade.

But New Jersey is failing at this basic job. The state admitted that it hasn’t revalidated a third of providers in the past five years – a blatant violation of federal law. Not only that, but it admitted that one Medicaid provider hasn’t been checked in more than 12 years. The state said about 200 providers could be in a similar boat.

An invitation to fraud

This is an invitation to fraud on a massive scale. The Trump administration has spent the past 18 months proving that huge numbers of Medicaid providers are fraudulent. In recent months, the federal government has charged nearly 300 people with over $500 million in false Medicaid claims. The Trump administration has cut funding to about 800 hospices and home health agencies suspected of fraud, usually in Medicaid.

But New Jersey can’t be bothered to help. The state is failing to look into Medicaid providers on a regular basis. Forget the law.

For the record, New Jersey is also failing to police fraud and abuse among Medicaid recipients. Just before the pandemic, the state government picked a random sample of people on Medicaid and checked whether they were actually eligible for this taxpayer handout. The shocking finding: Less than half of New Jersey’s Medicaid recipients were correctly deemed eligible. Over 50% were completely ineligible, placed in the wrong assistance category, or contained some other type of error.

That was back in early 2020. Since then, there still hasn’t been a reliable audit of New Jersey’s Medicaid program. But does anyone think the situation has improved? During the pandemic, New Jersey quickly added over 400,000 people to Medicaid, for a total of nearly 2.3 million. In recent years, states have shown close to zero concern for ensuring that Medicaid goes to the people who need it.

New Jersey is deliberately ignoring the problem – and so are other Democratic-governed States

Add it all up, and the conclusion is clear: New Jersey is turning a blind eye to welfare fraud. And the Garden State is hardly alone. Other blue states are bad offenders, too. Take California, where a pre-pandemic federal audit found over half of the Medicaid beneficiaries reviewed weren’t eligible.

As for provider revalidations, our organization has asked every state for the same data as New Jersey. New York keeps saying it will be transparent, but since it received our request on March 30 of this year, it has repeatedly asked for more time, using boilerplate language that doesn’t give us confidence.

Meanwhile, California denied our records request, while trying to charge us more than $180,000 for a similar request for Medicaid data two years ago. Gov. Gavin Newsom just signed the “Stop Nick Shirley Act,” effectively shielding the state from oversight and accountability by citizen journalists. What’s he hiding?

Michigan only looked at about 10% of its providers last year. Hawaii looked at fewer than 1% of its providers last year. They aren’t even close to fully complying with federal law. Whether it’s New Jersey, New York, or anywhere else, why do so many states seem to care so little about protecting taxpayers and preventing fraud?

They are on notice

Regardless, the Trump administration is putting them on notice. The White House’s Anti-Fraud task force is withholding federal funding from states that aren’t doing enough to fight fraud.  Based on our findings, New Jersey should be very worried. Gov. Mikie Sherrill and state lawmakers may want to start taking welfare fraud seriously – before the federal government takes away funding.

Other blue states should take action, too, from New York to California. They’ve let welfare fraud fester for far too long. It’s long past time they were held accountable.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.