Dentists Take Advantage of Children on Medicaid

They’re raking in hundreds of millions of dollars across multiple states. Over the past couple of years, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG), which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services, has been looking into a colossal scandal across the country. Thousands of dentists have been implicated in a series of reports by the OIG. The charge? Highly questionable Medicaid reimbursement bills for excessive and even needless services given to low-income children, often to their great harm. The latest report from OIG looks at California. It identified 335 providers with questionable billing practices who collected $117.5 million from Medicaid for pediatric dental services in 2012 alone. Half of these dentists worked for dental chains, suggesting an organized scam. They are, in fact, gaming Medicaid. It gets worse. OIS uncovered evidence suggesting that over 100 general dentists were either billing for procedures they didn’t do or were performing unnecessary dental procedures. These are only the dentists who got caught. How many others are doing this? What about pediatricians treating children on Medicaid? One can only imagine the depths of this type of malfeasance.