Each year, Orange County taxpayers kick in more than $65 million to help pay for doctor visits, prescription drugs and dental procedures for the poor and working poor. County officials now suspect that as much as $6.3 million of that — or nearly one in every $10 paid into Medicaid — instead goes to line the pockets of unscrupulous health-care providers and recipients. The estimate, which mirrors state and national projections of fraud, was reached with the help of new software that counties are using to root out abuse in the huge health insurance program.

The software — developed by computer giant IBM — examines a county’s Medicaid bills to spot fishy claims.

Procedures that take too long, doctors who claim to see an exorbitant number of patients or pharmaceutical bills for a patient who’s dead are all red-flagged.

Such problems have long plagued Medicaid but have drawn more scrutiny in New York since 2000, when Albany launched a dramatic expansion of the health-assistance program.

Experts estimate that more than $4 billion of the state’s $45 billion Medicaid program funds false claims.

For Orange, the IBM program, called VerifyNY, spit out about 8,000 pages of suspicious claims during an 18-month period. Those claims amount to $38 million in county, state and federal expenses.

Annually, that’s an estimated $25 million, of which $6.3 million would be the local share.

County workers are now combing through the data to determine how much can be lawfully explained and how much might be outright fraud.

County Executive Ed Diana said the volume of suspected fraud will determine how the county handles the investigation and prosecution of wrongdoers.

He and other county leaders have discussed hiring law firms to investigate cases in return for a portion of the money recovered.

“We’re definitely going to go after it,” Diana said. “We’re going to do everything in our power to recoup those dollars for the taxpayers.”

Medicaid costs account for nearly half of the state budget and is the single biggest expense for most counties. County governments, which foot about a quarter of the Medicaid bill, blame it for tax hikes across the state.

The state has backed counties to fight the fraud by opening its Medicaid billing database to fraud-detection programs.

Rockland was among the first counties to use this tool.

Orange County soon followed suit, and Ulster plans to use it, too.

Sullivan officials could not be reached.

ROL