In Support of An Outside Audit of Missouri’s Medicaid Program
Last month we wrote about a state audit of the St. Joseph School District that turned up tens of millions of dollars in questionable stipends, given out over the course of a decade. Good government requires constant vigilance over how our officials spend taxpayer money; events in St. Joe underline that fact.
But the state’s school districts aren’t the only state programs that deserve a closer look from Missourians. So, too, does the state’s Medicaid program, and neighboring state Illinois serves as a good example. From the Wall Street Journal late last year:
The federal government requires states to do an annual audit of the Medicaid rolls to ensure that participants are eligible, but in most states few people are removed. Ms. Bellock wanted to use an outside, private firm, Virginia-based Maximus, to audit [Illinois’s] 1.3 million Medicaid case files—which represents about 2.7 million individuals. The company has more extensive databases than the state and would likely identify more ineligible Medicaid beneficiaries.
Maximus recommended removing 249,912 cases by the end of February 2014, according to the state. By law, state employees had to review the recommendations and decide if cancellation is appropriate. The state removed 148,283 cases—about 234,000 individuals, as many cases represent families—from the Medicaid rolls.
Many of the removals suggested in Illinois were probably the product of expected churns in incomes; as people earn a little more money, they may no longer qualify for the Medicaid program. There’s nothing necessarily nefarious about that.
But whether people receiving benefits improperly are doing so because their incomes have recently changed or because they’re unambiguously defrauding the system, that doesn’t change the fact that the money has been misspent—and misspent needlessly. No one knows for sure if the same kind of waste that happened in Illinois is going on in Missouri, but that’s sort of the point; like in the St. Joseph School District and Illinois, the only way we can prevent future problems is with vigilance today.
Wasted money hurts the people Missouri is trying to help by siphoning off limited state resources, and that’s why Illinois’s third party eligibility verification framework, which appears to have effectively identified thousands of ineligible beneficiaries in the Land of Lincoln, is one Missouri may want to consider. Our state’s auditors deserve our immense appreciation for the work they do currently, but they don’t always have the resources or data to do some of the analyses some of these private vendors can do. As a supplement to our auditors’ work—and mark your calendar, because I don’t say this often—the state should think about following Illinois’s lead.
