Department of Health

Medicaid Payments for Diabetic Testing Supplies (Follow-Up)

Diabetic individuals use certain items to monitor their blood glucose levels. In New York State’s Medicaid program, pharmacies may be reimbursed for providing these items to diabetic Medicaid recipients. The reimbursements received on behalf of any single individual should be limited to a certain number of the items per month. In audit report 2008-S-123, we compared the limits in New York’s Medicaid program to the limits in Medicare and ten other states’ Medicaid programs. We found that New York’s Medicaid program allows reimbursements for far more items per month than all the other programs. We recommended the Department of Health (Department) consider lowering New York’s Medicaid limits on diabetic testing supplies as well as investigate certain instances where it appeared that reimbursements had been claimed for an excessive number of testing supplies per recipient. When we followed up on these matters, we found Department officials made some progress in correcting the problems we identified in the initial report but improvements were still needed.

For a complete copy of Report 2010-F-42 click here.