Medicaid’s Improper-Payment Mess

Source: Carolyn L. Yocom, “Medicaid: CMS Has Taken Steps, but Further Efforts Are Needed to Control Improper Payments, Testimony Before the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, Committee on Energy and Commerce, House of Representatives, January 31, 2017

There are at least a dozen solid reasons why New Mexico should not have expanded Medicaid under Obamacare, but earlier this week, an analyst from the Government Accountability Office raised a seldom-discussed issue with the state-federal healthcare program for “the poor.”

Carolyn L. Yocom, the GAO’s director of health care, testified before Congress that in “fiscal year 2016, improper payments totaled an estimated 10.5 percent … of federal Medicaid expenditures.”

D.C. considers payments improper when federal “funds go to the wrong recipient,” a recipient “receives the incorrect amount of funds,” there is no documentation “to support a payment,” or a recipient uses “funds in an improper manner.” Despite the oversight entities depicted in the graphic above, Medicaid’s improper payments are rising, from $29 billion in 2015 to $36 billion in 2016. (If Yocom has added states’ share of Medicaid spending, the total figure would have reached $60 billion.)

The GAO has “identified four key program integrity issues for the Medicaid program”:

* Eligibility determination is dysfunctional, with “gaps” in government’s ability ensure that only appropriate individuals are enrolled. In addition, beneficiaries have “payments made on their behalf concurrently by two or more states” and payments are made “for claims that were dated after a beneficiary’s death.”

* Oversight of managed care, which handles over “half of all Medicaid beneficiaries,” is weak. The improper-payment rate for providers is “currently less than one percent,” but the estimate “is based on a review of the payments made to managed care organizations and does not review any underlying medical documentation.”

* Ineligible providers are allowed to participate in the program. Bureaucrats access information that is “fragmented across 22 databases managed by 15 different federal agencies to screen providers,” but the databases “did not always have unique identifiers.” As a result, “providers with suspended or revoked licenses, improper mailing addresses, or deceased providers” are paid.

* Individuals are enrolled in Medicaid as well as Obamacare’s subsidized exchanges. Despite “procedures designed to prevent duplicate coverage, it [is] occurring.” The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services “has not developed a plan for assessing whether … procedures are sufficient to prevent and detect duplicate coverage.”

With Medicaid “serving” an estimated 44 percent of New Mexico’s population by the end of the current fiscal year, one can only wonder how many taxpayer dollars the program squanders in the Land of Enchantment.