The emphasis on targeting waste at LDH comes as Medicaid and other safety-net programs are under heightened scrutiny from the Trump administration over waste, fraud and whether they are being effectively administered. That includes recent high-profile cases in Minnesota involving publicly funded daycare programs, which have drawn national attention to gaps in fraud detection.<\/p>\n
In Louisiana, legislative audits have raised some questions about oversight and internal controls at the health department, which state officials say the new accountability role is meant to address.<\/p>\n
Steven Procopio,\u00a0president of the Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana, a nonpartisan good government group, called the new position a “positive step.”\u00a0<\/p>\n
“With health care consuming such a large share of state spending, taxpayers deserve strong internal controls and clear performance metrics,” Procopio said, adding that driving down waste should be measured by “real improvements” in performance and the state’s health outcomes.<\/p>\n
Money-saving moves<\/p>\n
The new role will not add staff or funding, department officials said. Instead, LDH plans to beef up its existing compliance office. That includes performance evaluations that emphasize health outcomes and \u201chow the department fights fraud, waste, and abuse, with the ultimate goal of helping Louisianans move from dependence to independence,\u201d according to a statement from LDH spokesperson Emma Herrock.<\/p>\n
Greenstein pointed to several recent anti-fraud efforts as part of the focus. The department\u2019s SNAP fraud unit recouped $3.4 million last year. LDH identified and removed duplicate Medicaid enrollees \u2014 mostly people enrolled in Medicaid in two states \u2014 which the department said resulted in $104 million in savings.<\/p>\n
The state has also tightened oversight of long-term personal care services in Medicaid, flagging providers with high-risk behavior, such as those that often manually enter or edit visits rather than using electronic visit verification. Those changes led to an increase in cases referred for review, which LDH estimates could result in $2.4 million being returned.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re going to do more of that,\u201d Greenstein said. \u201cWe\u2019re going to establish an inspector general inside of LDH to be sure that our programs are working, both on the financial audit side and on the performance audit side.\u201d<\/p>\n
Audits point out misspending, waste<\/p>\n
Last year, state auditors flagged weaknesses in the agency\u2019s oversight. A report from the Louisiana Legislative Audit Office in August 2025 found that LDH paid $9.6 million in Medicaid claims for 1,072 beneficiaries even though they had already died, based on a review of obituaries, Social Security records and state vital records.<\/p>\n
Medicaid Director Seth Gold said it remains a focus for the agency.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is always a little crazy to me \u2014 we continue to pay for dead people, and we are in the process of stopping that,\u201d Gold said.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Seth Gold has been named Medicaid director at the Louisiana Department of Health.<\/p>\n
Submitted by Louisiana Department of Health<\/p>\n
In an April 2025 financial audit that looked at spending in 2024, the auditors also found that LDH kept paying health insurance companies for more than 50,000 Medicaid patients, even though those people didn\u2019t use any services for a long time \u2014 in some cases, up to seven years.<\/p>\n
Medicaid pays managed care companies a monthly fee for each person enrolled whether they get care or not. The state spent about $1.23 billion covering people who never went to the doctor or fulfilled a prescription during that time.<\/p>\n
Those 50,000 people weren\u2019t necessarily ineligible, but the audit pointed out that the state wasn\u2019t regularly checking if those enrollees still qualified or if they potentially had another insurance they were using, leading to unnecessary spending under the fee-per-person model.<\/p>\n
Auditors found that Louisiana\u2019s health department repeatedly failed to properly document and justify Medicaid spending. Though they did not find fraud, they said poor documentation and accounting put more than $250 million in federal funds at risk because in many cases the state could not provide proof that the money was spent as intended.<\/p>\n
In response, LDH said the audit findings reflect documentation and reporting errors rather than misuse of funds, and that the department is strengthening internal controls and review processes to ensure Medicaid spending is properly reported going forward.<\/p>\n
At the meeting last month, Greenstein vowed that under his watch, LDH would be more meticulous in its accounting. He was appointed to the position by Gov. Jeff Landry in April 2025.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“There should be $0 that are wasted, and any funding that we have needs to produce value,” Greenstein said. “Just doing it because we always have this constant stream of funding is not good enough.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Louisiana Department of Health is expanding its internal watchdog role, with officials aiming to create closer oversight…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":579723,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[12351,210,1141,1142,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-579722","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health-care","8":"tag-hardwall","9":"tag-health","10":"tag-health-care","11":"tag-healthcare","12":"tag-united-states","13":"tag-unitedstates","14":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116046083089035880","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=579722"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579722\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/579723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=579722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=579722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=579722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}