Department of Social Services v. Mellas

PAUL M. SPINDEN, Judge.

The Department of Social Services charges the Administrative Hearing Commission with erroneously refusing to defer to the decision of its Division of Medical Services concerning the amount of sanction to impose against John Mellas, a physician who used the wrong code to bill for his Medicaid services. 1 We concur with the commission that it may make the decision that the department should have made and was not obligated to defer to the department’s original ruling so long as the commission’s decision was lawful and rested on a sound factual basis. Because the errors in…