The office of the inspector general (OIG) for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has uncovered seventy-nine “high-risk security vulnerabilities” in the information processing systems of ten state Medicaid agencies that “raise concerns about the integrity of the systems used to process Medicaid claims.” While the ten states are not identified by name, the OIG said that the investigation “suggests that other State Medicaid information systems may be similarly vulnerable,” though the results could not be conclusively applied to all fifty states.  Now that the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act has taken effect in 2014, millions of new enrollees will be added to these same state systems, ready or not.

While the number of findings range from a low of three in one state to a high of seventeen in another, a chart accompanying the report illustrates the pervasiveness of the problems throughout the states, as well as the widespread nature of the vulnerabilities: