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Maryland paid $147,000 to cover a resident’s Medicaid expenses starting 11 months after that person died, according to a state audit released Wednesday.
Although the person died in October 2007, the state began paying a nursing home on his behalf in September 2008, and the payments continued until December 2010 “when the payments stopped without any explanation,” the report from the Office of Legislative Audits says.
Those payments are a small portion of the money mistakenly paid to cover the health care of residents who died, the report reveals. Between Jan. 1, 2008, and March 10, 2011, the state may have spent as much as $7.5 million on 532 individuals after their reported death dates.
Another 1,050 residents with listed dates of death were discovered in the state’s list of eligible Medicaid recipients, though no payments were discovered.
Maryland may have been paying for dead residents’ medical care for years, said auditor Bruce Myers. He didn’t know how much money was lost to incorrect payments.
Most of the errors occur because the state doesn’t know the person receiving payments has died, the report says.
The state’s Department of Human Resources and Department of Health and Mental Hygiene rely on the Maryland Vital Statistics Administration death database to determine when a resident receiving Medicaid ??– the government health care program for the poor — has died. But the database does not keep track of residents who die outside the state. Instead, the state agencies should match Medicaid records against the Social Security Administration’s “Death Master File,” the report recommended.
Other errors occur when people have similar names, birth dates and Social Security numbers said Charles Milligan, deputy secretary for health care financing at the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
For example, the individual whose nursing home was supposed to have received $147,000 shared the same name, birth date and first three digits of his Social Security number with another nursing home resident receiving Medicaid payments. Although the payments were recorded under the case number of the dead resident, they were actually going to the nursing home of the living resident, Milligan said.
The errors can cost the state thousands of dollars apiece.
One person was approved to receive Medicaid benefits in April 2007, became ineligible in May 2007 and died on Nov. 4, 2007. However, the state didn’t stop payments until March 2011, resulting in $31,946 spent to keep a dead resident healthy.
In fiscal 2010 and 2011, the state recovered incorrect payments totaling about $7 million, the report says. More recent payments are still being recovered.
