WASHINGTON (AP) — Medicaid programs made more than $200 million in improper payments to health care providers between 2021 and 2022 for people who had already died, according to a new report from the independent watchdog for the Department of Health and Human Services.
But the department’s Office of Inspector General said it expects a new provision in the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill that would require states to audit their Medicaid beneficiary lists could help reduce these improper payments in the future.
These types of improper payments “are not unique to one state, and the issue continues to be persistent,” Aner Sanchez, regional deputy inspector general at the Office of Audit Services told The Associated Press. Sanchez has been researching this issue for ten years.
The watchdog’s report released Tuesday said more than $207.5 million in managed care payments were made on behalf of deceased enrollees between July 2021 and July 2022. The office recommends that the federal government share more information with state governments to recover erroneous payments — including a Social Security database known as the Full Death Master File, which contains more than 14918 million records.
Sharing of Complete Death Master File data has been severely restricted due to privacy laws that protect against identity theft and fraud.
The massive tax and spending bill signed into law by President Donald Trump this summer expands how the Complete Death Master File can be used by mandating Medicaid agencies to quarterly verify their lists of providers and beneficiaries against the file, starting in 2027. The intention is to stop payments to dead people and improve accuracy.
Tuesday’s report is the first nationwide look at improper Medicaid payments. Since 2016, the HHS inspector general has conducted 18 audits on a selection of state programs and had identified that Medicaid agencies had made improperly managed care payments on behalf of deceased enrollees totaling approximately $289 million.
The government had some success using the Full Death Master File to prevent improper payments earlier this year. In January, the Treasury Department reported that it had recovered more than $31 million in federal payments that went wrong to dead people as part of a five-month pilot program after Congress gave the Treasury temporary access to the file for three years as part of the 2021 appropriations bill.
Meanwhile, the SSA has been making unusual updates to the file itself, adding and removing records, complicating its use. For example, the Trump administration in April moved to classify thousands of living immigrants as dead and cancel their Social Security numbers to stop immigrants who had been temporarily allowed to live in the United States under programs started during the Biden administration.