DOJ needs to create a special Child Medicaid Fraud Task Force
Dr. Phil: “Foster Care is a Social Circumstance, Not a Mental Illness”
The House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Human Resources heard testimony yesterday on the disproportionate use of psychotropic medications on foster youths, and the president’s $750 million proposal to address the issue.
The hearing yesterday was spurred along by the presence of a celebrity witness, talk show host “Dr. Phil” McGraw.
“These drugs can change and even save lives,” McGraw told the committee. But with foster youths, they are “too often misused as chemical straitjackets,” prescribed to mitigate “undesirable behavior” and make foster youths “less inconvenient.”
The use of psychotropics on foster youths has received attention from several corners in both houses of Congress and the White House in recent months. President Barack Obama proposed in his fiscal 2015 budget a $750 million, 10-year plan to help states develop different ways to address mental health challenges among foster youths.
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67 youth gathered in Washington for Foster Youth Shadow Day.
Dr. Phil, in town to address them, told a Congressional Committee
that psychotropic drugs were too often
used as “chemical straitjackets” on foster youth |
Last week, Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee said the committee plans to “play offense” on what Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) called “mind-bending drugs.”
Ways and Means leadership from both parties asserted an interest in addressing the issue. “This is a bipartisan issue,” said Subcommittee Chairman David Reichert, “We are together on this.”
A 2011 law shepherded through Ways and Means required states to share their prescription and monitoring protocols with the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), a division of the Department of Health and Human Services.
“Everyone agrees that these drugs are flowing too much,” McGraw said. “The real question is, why? Why is this happening?”
Medicaid fraud.
What was not addressed in this hearing was:
1. The only way for a parent to access comprehensive mental health for a child is to "voluntarily" place the child in foster care. This is the only way Medicaid pays for treatment. "It must be noted that "voluntary" is registered as and reported a "neglect" data.
2. A child diagnosed with a mental health disorder in foster care garners higher cost reimbursements from Medicaid. Foster children will "automatically" be diagnosed in order to increase revenues.
3. Kickbacks, Physician referrals, phantom billing and double billing are common factors as the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare and the States have no enforcement mechanism to address this type of fraudulent activity.
The Department of Justice needs to create a Child Medicaid Fraud Task Force.
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