AUSTIN – Texas officials are giving up on getting medical providers to repay hundreds of millions of dollars in Medicaid funding that the state for years has said was fraudulently billed for questionable dental and orthodontic procedures.
After a series of negative headlines and courtroom losses, the Health and Human Services Commission this month formally offered settlements for most of nearly 100 pending cases of alleged overbilling, all for only fractions of damages that were once claimed. Almost all of the remaining cases are expected to be cleared by the end of the year.
In all, the commission appears to be expecting to recoup $20 million or less of the $823 million in fraud and waste suspected during a five-year period in which Texas at times spent nearly as much on Medicaid dental and orthodontic services as the rest of the states combined.
Source: State drops efforts to recover millions from alleged dental fraud Houston Chronicle