Medicaid money being used to pay bonuses to Administrator
WBIR.com had a story about a Tennessee nursing home getting caught billing Medicaid for employee bonuses. Many times Medicaid fraud occurs when nursing homes are being compensated for services they never provided. It is a waste of taxpayer money and should be strictly enforced as Medicaid fraud.
In the case discussed in the story, the nursing home was over billing TennCare for excessive employee bonuses. Wayne County Nursing Home and its administrators have agreed to pay $200,000 to settle claims that the home billed the state's expanded Medicaid program too much for bonuses. It shocks me that nursing homes can use any Medicaid money to pay bonuses for non-licensed health care providers like Administrators.
Attorney General Bob Cooper said state law requires bonuses to be "reasonable", but these bonuses totaled over $1.3 million. Of course, the state law doesn't define what is reasonable nor do they require that the nursing homes have sufficient staff, deficiency free surveys or any other indicia of good care before allowing these excessive bonuses. The bonuses were 40 percent of the employees' annual salary in 2004 and were billed to TennCare through the nursing home's cost reports.
