Illinois paid more than $12 million in health costs for dead people

Rather than push for true Medicaid reform that might ensure patient access to high quality care and protect taxpayer dollars, Gov. Pat Quinn is about to sign legislation that will further prop up this failing system. As evidence of just how dysfunctional the system is, Auditor General William Holland reported that the state paid $12 million for dead...

Rather than push for true Medicaid reform that might ensure patient access to high quality care and protect taxpayer dollars, Gov. Pat Quinn is about to sign legislation that will further prop up this failing system. As evidence of just how dysfunctional the system is, Auditor General William Holland reported that the state paid $12 million for dead Medicaid enrollees.

Medicaid, the federal-state program that is supposed to provide medical services to the state’s indigent and medically needy, paid $12 million for services for people listed as deceased.

Not only does this feed into the stereotype of a corrupt and incompetent state government, but this “news” is just the tip of the iceberg. At every turn, state bureaucrats have fought and hindered efforts to scrub the state’s Medicaid rolls.

The federal government pays for about half of the program costs for most enrollees and almost the entire cost for newly eligible enrollees under the Affordable Care Act, or ACA. The state was already facing enormous challenges verifying eligibility for those who are enrolled in the Medicaid program.

The state of Illinois had been using a private contractor to scrub its Medicaid eligibility rolls, but the firm was blocked by the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. The firm was finding that 40 percent of the Medicaid enrollees were ineligible for the program. And that was only halfway through the project. According to estimates, the private-contractor Medicaid scrub could have saved Illinois taxpayers $350 million per year.

The reason the private firm was sought in the first place was that the state was failing to verify Medicaid eligibility, confirmed by the state’s own Auditor General. In response to years of waste, fraud and abuse, state lawmakers hired a private firm to the job.

Recent attempts to pass legislation that would continue Medicaid eligibility verification were thwarted in the Illinois General Assembly and there is little reason to believe that there is true commitment within the administration to ending what appears to be rampant waste of taxpayer dollars throughout the state’s Medicaid program.

As a result of the federal health care overhaul, the state now expects 430,000 new Medicaid enrollees by the end of the year, which is much higher than the state previously estimated. If the state has been inept at verifying eligibility up to this point, one has to wonder how much more bloated the program will become.

Not only has Illinois received yet another black eye in the media for the state’s mismanagement and failure to protect both its taxpayers and most-vulnerable citizens, but this new legislative action does little more than perpetuate a money-grabbing scheme at the expense of true reform efforts.