In response to a scathing report that found rampant fraud and a lack of government oversight of taxpayer-funded rehabilitation clinics in California, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday to review its authority over such clinics and its ability to end payments to rehab operators who are breaking the law.
Additionally, the board voted to require the development of safeguards to ensure that parolees, troubled youths and parents who are dealing with alcohol or substance abuse are not referred to clinics whose contracts have been suspended because of fraud.
"We want to make sure we don't trip over our own feet here," said board Chairman Mark Ridley-Thomas during Tuesday's meeting.
The move was in response to a July report by CNN and the Center for Investigative Reporting that found widespread impropriety by clinic operators who provide substance-abuse treatment for the poor. Such programs receive federal and state money, and the contracts are awarded through the counties.
In response to the report, state officials launched a review and stopped payments to 38 firms operating 108 clinics.
Many of the allegations in the report, such as billing for nonexistent clients, occurred in Los Angeles County, the state's most populous. In the fiscal year that ended June 30, the county contracted with 143 drug and alcohol rehabilitation firms, serving 30,000 people at a cost of $99.5 million.
County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky authored the motion approved Tuesday, which requires county attorneys and auditors to report back in 30 days about the county's oversight authority and ability to end contracts with clinics. The motion also calls for an audit of the Drug Medi-Cal program that provides services to the county's poor, and the development of a protocol to determine the severity of problems in such clinics, with a requirement that top county leaders be notified about the most troubled.
Yaroslavsky said the role of the county and the state in the auditing process is unclear, with some in the county health department believing that the county did not have an oversight role but rather served as a conduit for the funding.
"Someone in the bowels of the bureaucracy made certain assumptions and decisions — I'm not saying they weren't made in good faith. The decisions made apparently suggested they did not have the authority to cut bad contractors loose," Yaroslavsky said in an interview last week. "I believe we have authority we haven't used to audit the contractors, and if we find they're not operating ethically and legally, we should have the authority to cut them loose, as we do other contractors in the county."
seema.mehta@latimes.com
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