January 1, Medicaid and SNAP Gave Tax Dollars to the Dead

Wyatt’s Take

• Dead people were paid millions in benefits.
• Government failed to fix mistakes, wasting tax dollars.
• Officials now promise changes and stricter oversight.

Taxpayers are footing the bill for government errors again. Recent audits found that states kept paying Medicaid and SNAP benefits to people who had already died.

The Office of Inspector General (OIG) revealed some states let Medicaid managed care organizations collect improper payments after enrollees passed away. Problems were noticed in several audits from 2009 to 2019. The OIG estimated that $248.6 million went to insurance plans on behalf of the deceased, with a federal share of about $171.8 million. About $41 million of those federal funds still haven’t been recovered.

“A predictable, upfront, set amount of money to cover the predicted cost of all or some of the health care services for a specific patient over a certain period of time,” is how capitation payments work, according to federal health officials.

Even after previous audits and warnings, states have kept making the same mistake. Mistakes included slow updating of death records, weak data systems, bad record-keeping, and lack of good internal controls.

Some states didn’t use data services to confirm enrollees had died. Others did not use alternative checks, went without direct data exchanges, or failed to update death dates in their records. These errors led to continued waste.

The OIG called on federal officials to collect the remaining $41 million, and to help states tighten internal processes. They also recommended using data comparisons to catch mistakes early and reduce future losses. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) said most old mistakes had been fixed, and $126 million had been refunded. But CMS rejected an idea to routinely match data on enrollees with federal death records.

The OIG disagreed and said tighter matching was necessary. Auditors stressed that taxpayers need every dollar spent to go to the living, not to dead people’s accounts.

Problems don’t stop at Medicaid. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins spoke out, saying SNAP, or food stamp, benefits also wound up going to fraudsters and the deceased. She warned that “half a million people getting benefits, two times under the same name, 5,000 dead people,” and that “80% of able-bodied Americans…can work, and they choose not to work, of course, because they’re getting significant benefits from the taxpayer.”

Rollins called SNAP “perhaps one of the most corrupt, dysfunctional programs in American history.” She promised a crackdown and announced plans to make all recipients reapply to weed out fraud.

It’s another reminder that bloated, unchecked government programs hit responsible Americans right in the wallet. Hardworking families must keep paying, while bureaucrats drag their feet fixing obvious problems.

Read the full report here

Wyatt Matters

Families across Middle America work hard for every dollar, so seeing their tax money handed out to the dead feels like a slap in the face. Every wasted cent is money not going to roads, schools, or folks who truly need help. Common sense and honest oversight should be the standard, not the exception.