WASHINGTON — Medicaid programs generated more than $200 million in improper payments to health care providers between 2021 and 2022 for people who have already died, according to a new report from an independent health watchdog. Department of Health and Human Services.
But the department's Office of Inspector General said it expects a new provision in the Republicans' One Big Beautiful bill requiring states to audit their lists of Medicaid recipients could help reduce those improper payments in the future.
These types of improper payments “are not unique to one state, and the problem continues to persist,” Aner Sanchez, deputy inspector general for the Office of Audit Services, told The Associated Press. Sanchez has been researching this question for ten years.
The watchdog's report released Tuesday found that more than $207.5 million in managed care benefits were paid out on behalf of deceased members between July 2021 and July 2022. The office encourages the federal government to share additional information with state governments to recover incorrect payments, including Social Security A database known as the Complete Death Master File, which contains more than 142 million records dating back to 1899.
The transfer of Death Master's complete file data is strictly limited due to privacy laws that protect against identity theft and fraud.
A sweeping tax and spending bill that was signed into law by President Donald Trump this summer expands the use of the Complete Death Master File by requiring Medicaid agencies to review their lists of providers and beneficiaries against the file on a quarterly basis beginning in 2027. The goal is to stop payments to dead people and improve accuracy.
The report, released Tuesday, is the first national look at improper Medicaid payments. Since 2016, the HHS inspector general has conducted 18 audits of a range of government programs and found that Medicaid agencies improperly made managed care payments on behalf of deceased enrollees, totaling about $289 million.
Earlier this year, the government had some success using the Complete Death Master File to prevent improper payments. In January, the Treasury Department said it had taken retaliatory measures. over $31 million in federal payments the money improperly went to deceased people under a five-month pilot program after Congress gave the Treasury temporary access to the file for three years as part of the 2021 appropriations bill.
Meanwhile, the SSA makes unusual updates to the file itself, adding and deleting records and making it more difficult to use. For example, the Trump administration in April moved to classify thousands of living immigrants as dead and cancel their Social Security numbers to crack down on immigrants who were allowed to live temporarily in the U.S. under programs started under the Biden administration.
