This article by Robert Doar, a former commissioner of the New York City Human Resources Administration, should be shocking even to those familiar with the high rate of fraud in government welfare programs. It also highlights yet another reason why Medicaid expansion would be a disaster for North Carolina.
A recent report on Medicaid in Louisiana ….. selected 100 Medicaid recipients at random and found that 82 of them shouldn’t have qualified for all the benefits they received, ….
Scandalous as it is, this is no real surprise. Federal and state program administrators have consciously and significantly loosened the verification processes that once were part of enrolling applicants in SNAP, Medicaid and other programs. …
ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion bears most of the blame. The new law made people earning up to 138% of the federal poverty line eligible to receive Medicaid. The Medicaid marketplace it created includes no mandatory verification processes, allowing people simply to declare their income and start receiving benefits. As described in a 2013 issue brief from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services touting “simplified, real-time verification”: “Eligibility will be verified primarily through self-attestation.” Simplified indeed. ….ObamaCare also eliminated asset testing in Medicaid altogether, so that in addition to minimizing verification of income, neither states nor the federal government can look into what applicants own. (emphasis added)
Expansion in NC would add as many as an estimated 600,000 new people to Medicaid – how many of them would be fraudulent? And how many more would game the system, swelling the Medicaid rolls even further?
Because of loose verification practices, Medicaid expansion would likely stuff way more people into an already overcrowded system than projected. These mostly healthy, childless, working-age adults would crowd out the more needy recipients; and siphon taxpayer money away from other state budget priorities.
