Fraud Settlements Bring 1.4 Million Back To Wyoming

More than 1.4 millions dollars comes back into Wyoming's Medicaid program funds following a series of fraud settlements.

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The Wyoming Attorney General's Office announced the results of work by its Medicaid Fraud Control Unit last week. About a dozen pharmaceutical companies were investigated for fraud and abuses that include improper marketing of drugs, sometimes for unapproved uses. A number of cases involve kick backs to doctors for prescribing the name brand instead of the less expensive generic.

"These are national settlements with all of the states and the federal government, because these pharmaceutical companies, the things that they're doing they're doing nationally, and so they effect all of the states as well as the federal government."

Director of the Medicaid Fraud Unit in Wyoming, Christine Cox, says the number of settlements- and she says there are more on the way- points to a trend nationally to come down hard on this kind of fraud.

"So I think that it's trickling down to the states and to all of the efforts happening nationally to fight health-care fraud that involves medicaid and medicare both."

The settlements come out of investigations made between 2002 through 2009.

Cox says when the money doesn't go to the people who really need it we are all injured, "and I think the most important thing to know is that we take this seriously and we are going to do everything we can to recover money that was not paid out correctly and not going to the people who need it in the most in our state."