At this point, it goes without saying that Missouri’s Medicaid program has issues. From technical snafus to indisputable quality and access problems, the state’s Medicaid program has a long track record of failure that should dissuade responsible lawmakers from compounding the problem with an expansion of the program.
This fact is made all the more obvious by this story, reported last week.
Missouri’s Medicaid program could have recovered as much as $27 million from more than 30,000 estates of deceased patients but did not file claims in time, according to a statewide audit of federal programs released Tuesday.
Federal and Missouri laws allow the state to recover Medicaid funds spent on a participant as a state debt but a claim against the person’s estate in probate court must be filed within a year of their death. Of 9,321 cases closed in fiscal year 2014 by the MO HealthNet Division, an average of $15,000 was recovered from 6 percent of those, according to the audit.
The $27 million estimate is based on a similar estimated recovery rate for the 30,000 cases that were past the deadline to file. . . .
According to the audit, “MHD personnel indicated there are not sufficient staff in the Probate and Estate Unit to process all probate estate cases timely and cases are not prioritized in an effort to maximize recovery.” The department says it will work to fix the problem but that response is a recurring theme in audits of Missouri’s Medicaid program.
Indeed, there were more problems uncovered by the audit that a short news story frankly can’t get to, including documentation, oversight, payment, and coding problems. In fact, the sentence construction of “As noted in X previous audits” dots the report’s summary. In other words, many of these are enduring, not passing, problems.
If you believe in good government, the department’s semiannual refrain of “We’ll do better next time” should be intolerable. The solution isn’t growing the program; it’s fixing it. There are ways to make the Medicaid program in Missouri better. Expanding a broken status quo is not one of those ways.
