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Medicaid payments for dead patients recovered by state
$14M identified, audit reports
BY MICHAEL VIRTANEN The Associated Press

    ALBANY — The state has stopped making Medicaid payments for the dead and recovered $14 million from providers who filed such medical claims, an audit found.
    The state Health Department was faulted in 2006 for paying $3.6 million over three years in Medicaid claims for 4,277 deceased patients. In a followup report released Friday, the state comptroller’s office said the department now requires all patients’ Social Security numbers and in a comprehensive review recovered more than $14 million paid for care after people died.
    The first audit noted one nursing home collecting $15,000 although the patient died two years earlier.
    “During the last year the office of the Medicaid inspector general has worked with us to identify areas in our system that should be plugged. This was one of the easier ones,” Health Department spokeswoman Claudia Hutton said. Now claims are routinely checked against the Social Security data to determine whether patients are in fact still living.
    “This is something we had been working on,” Hutton said. “The Medcaid management system is a computer. The basic software was established years ago. We’ve added edits to it to block certain kinds of payments that should not happen.”
    New York has the most expensive Medicaid program in the country. About 4.1 million people in the state receive benefits totaling about $47 billion a year.
    In the report for April 1, 2003, through Feb. 3, 2006, auditors identified 175,939 recipients of the health care payments for the poor who had given either inaccurate or no Social Security numbers to their local districts. As of Feb. 14, auditors found all active recipients required to provide an accurate number had done so.
    Auditors reported the Health Department had taken all their recommendations, including verifying emergency medical assistance provided to illegal or undocumented immigrants in compliance with federal and state regulations.
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