Billions In ‘Questionable Payments’ Went To California’s Medicaid Insurers And Providers

(By Chad Terhune for California Healthline produced by Kaiser Health News)

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. Continue reading article here…

This story was produced by Kaiser Health News, which publishes California Healthline, a service of the California Health Care Foundation.”

Kaiser Health News is a nonprofit national health policy news service that is part of the nonpartisan Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

Notice: The link provided above connects readers to the full content of the posted article. The URL (internet address) for this link is valid on the posted date; medicarereport.org cannot guarantee the duration of the link’s validity. Also, the opinions expressed in these postings are the viewpoints of the original source and are not explicitly endorsed by AMAC, Inc.; the AMAC Foundation, Inc.; or medicarereport.org.