(By Chad Terhune for California Healthline produced by Kaiser Health News)<\/p>\n
California\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
She said she found \u201cpervasive discrepancies\u201d in Medicaid enrollment in which state and county records didn\u2019t 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\u2019s Medicaid program, known as Medi-Cal. Continue reading article here…<\/a><\/p>\n This story was produced by Kaiser Health News, which publishes California Healthline, a service of the California Health Care Foundation.\u201d<\/p>\n Kaiser Health News is a nonprofit national health policy news service that is part of the nonpartisan Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.<\/p>\n
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