The Opioid Dens of Medicaid

More evidence that the entitlement may be facilitating abuse.

WSJ editorial. Excerpts:

"Yet Medicaid offers cheap access to astronomical quantities of pills that can be resold on the black market. For as low as a $1 co-pay Medicaid beneficiaries can get up to 240 oxycodone pills that can be resold for $4,000, according to the report. Since 2010 more than 1,000 people across the country have been charged or convicted of improper use of Medicaid to obtain prescription opioids.

Mr. Johnson’s report captures some of the sordid specifics, including a case in Connecticut where a perpetrator “preyed on” Medicaid beneficiaries who were “down on their luck,” according to a detective the committee interviewed. The drug ring leader would pay Medicaid beneficiaries, say, $50 to get a prescription filled. Pharmacists tended to trust the Medicaid system and filled the scripts. Then the perpetrator would sell the opioids on the street for up to $3,000 for a single bottle. The perpetrator pleaded guilty to multiple charges in 2015.

Fraud is a feature of any government program, but here crime is especially lucrative. The Johnson report walks through everything from a drug ring in a Bronx bodega to a Maryland pharmacist who defrauded Medicaid for some $90,000 to a $1 billion fraud from a cabal of health-care providers in Miami."