Maine Wire reporter Jon Fetherston met with Dr. Mehmet Oz, Administrator of the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services this week to discuss systemic fraud involving non-governmental organizations in the state’s home health care industry.
The meeting took place at Paradise Residential in Portland after Oz’s staff reached out to Fetherston.
“Dr. Oz was aware of the shout out that we had received from the vice president up in Bangor,” Fetherston said. “And he was aware of the tweet that Steve Robinson had posted of me when I was outside of Paradise Residential, and I caught the president of Paradise Residential, when I tried to ask her questions, she jumped into her Mercedes and drove off. So he was aware of all of that.”
Fetherston said the two discussed the scale of the problem. “We walked through why fraud is such a big issue in Maine, and we talked about how elected leaders ignored these non-government organizations.”
Oz raised comparisons to his own observations elsewhere. “He brought up his experiences in Minnesota and asked if it was similar to Maine with the Somali community, and I said a hundred percent,” Fetherston recounted. “The Somali community and the Rwandan community came to Maine, were encouraged to open up these NGOs by the Mills administration. The Mills administration looked the other way, and oftentimes the people who opened these home healthcare NGOs just said, ‘Well, this is the way they do it in Maine.’ And the penalties have been minimal at best.”
Fetherston also pointed to the role of resettlement organizations. “We talked about how Catholic Charities played a role in bringing the new Mainers to Maine and being encouraged to get into home health care,” he said. He added that public frustration is growing: “People are beginning to get concerned because nobody’s been arrested.”
