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By Chad Terhune | KHN.org
California’s Medicaid program made at least $4 billion in questionable payments to health insurers and medical providers over a four-year period because as many as 453,000 people were ineligible for the public benefits, according to a state audit released Tuesday.
In one case, the state paid a managed-care plan $383,635 to care for a person in Los Angeles County who had been dead for more than four years, according to California State Auditor Elaine Howle.
She said she found “pervasive discrepancies” in Medicaid enrollment in which state and county records didn’t match up from 2014 to 2017, leading to other errors that persisted for years. The bulk of the questionable payments, or $3 billion, went to health plans that contract with the state to care for 80 percent of enrollees in California’s Medicaid program, known as Medi-Cal.
The program for low-income residents is the nation’s largest and funded by both the federal and state governments. The state findings echo similar problems cited by federal officials and come at a time when the Trump administration has applied extra scrutiny to California’s spending on Medicaid.
In the report, the state auditor said it’s critical for the state to have accurate information on eligibility “because it pays managed care plans a monthly premium for an increasing number of Medi-Cal beneficiaries regardless of whether beneficiaries receive services.”
California’s Medicaid program has 13.2 million enrollees, covering about 1 in 3 residents. It has an annual budget of $107 billion, counting federal and state funds. Nearly 11 million of those enrollees are in managed care plans, in which insurers are paid a monthly fee per enrollee to coordinate care.
The state’s Medicaid enrollment soared by more than 50 percent since 2013 due to the rollout of the Affordable Care Act and the expansion of Medicaid. Enrollment grew from 8.6 million in December 2013 to more than 13 million in December 2017, according to the audit report.
In the case of the dead patient, a family member had notified the county of the enrollee’s death in April 2014. However, the person’s name remained active in the state system, and California officials assigned the patient to a managed-care plan in November of that year.
From then on, the state kept making monthly payments of about $8,300 to the health plan until August 2018, shortly after the auditor alerted officials of the error. Auditors didn’t identify the health plan.
There also were costly mistakes in cases in which Medi-Cal pays doctors and hospitals directly for patient care – a program known as “fee for service.”
