Medicare and Medicaid Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz announced in the Oval Office on Tuesday that Health and Human Services (HHS) is deferring an additional $1.2 billion in Medicaid funding from California over concerns of widespread fraud in its state healthcare programs.
The federal government’s withholding of Medicaid payments to California now totals more than $3.3 billion.
“They just got the note, and we’re doing that because of the growth of personal care services in California,” Oz said. “California has been growing that program 24 percent in the last three years. That is twice the rate of every other state average in the country. Impossible for us to understand how that could be so.”…