Michigan made $39.9 million in Medicaid payments to deceased enrollees over a two-year period a decade ago, with a total of $249 million spent across 14 states.
This is according to a new report titled the “Welfare Walking Dead” from the non-profit the Foundation for Government Accountability, which looked at federal audit data from the Office of Inspector General, among other research.
In an exclusive interview with The Center Square, Jonathan Bain said that every taxpayer should be concerned with these findings. Bain is a senior research fellow at the FGA and authored the report.
“The average citizen should care about these findings because it’s yet another example of government waste that’s rooted in inefficiency and lack of care and precision,” Bain explained. “Every dollar that is lost to waste, fraud, or abuse is a dollar that cannot be spent to benefit the truly needy—folks like pregnant women, low-income kids, or seniors.”
Of the 14 states the audit looked at, the report found that Michigan reported one of the highest amounts of Medicaid payments to the deceased. States that surpassed it included California at $70.9 million and Ohio at $51.3 million.
Other states, including ones with much higher populations than Michigan, reported much lower Medicaid payments to the deceased. That included Florida at $26.2 million and Illinois at $4.6 million.
Bain said there is action that states can take to ensure fraud is not happening.
“States have the tools to identify these deceased enrollees,” he said. “The issue is that they either aren’t doing the proper cross checks to discover them, or their Medicaid Management Information Systems aren’t being updated to reflect that a deceased enrollee has been flagged.”
The report found that most of the states audited did not routinely enter death information into their Medicaid Management Information Systems.
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