Talk about unfinished business: The dead apparently need more than $1 billion to pay for — among other things — prescriptions, wheelchairs, rent, and heating and air conditioning bills. At least, bureaucrats seem to think so. In the last decade, the federal government shelled out money to more than 250,000 deceased individuals, according to a new report by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.).
As the Wall Street Journal revealed earlier this month, some of that money was stimulus funds distributed by the Social Security Administration — but Coburn’s report makes clear SSA is not the only agency to bury bills in dormant bank accounts or to line the pockets of people who defraud the system by collecting benefits for deceased relatives.
The Department of Health and Human Services, for example, passed out $3.9 million in assistance to 11,000 dead people to pay heating and cooling costs, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development knowingly distributed $15.2 million in housing subsidies to nearly 4,000 households with at least one dead person. Medicare doled out as much as $92 million in claims for medical supplies prescribed by dead doctors and $8.2 million for medical supplies prescribed for dead patients.
Nor is the problem likely to end soon. According to new accountability measures announced by the administration in June, agencies are supposed to consult the SSA’s Death Master File before they distribute payments to payees — but SSA Commissioner Michael Astrue said in a 2009 letter to Coburn that the records might not be perfectly accurate.
“It is extremely expensive and may even be impossible to determine if a person is alive or dead particularly if the person died many years ago,” Astrue wrote.
But Coburn urges the agency to do better. “At a minimum, SSA must take an active role in determining when its beneficiaries are deceased and not solely depend on family members and funeral homes to notify it of deaths as they currently do,” he writes in the report.
After all, as Coburn also notes, “at a time when our country has incurred a $1.3 trillion deficit and a $13.4 trillion debt, these wasted funds would be better spent reducing the deficit or addressing real needs during this time of economic uncertainty.”
The dead certainly won’t feel the spending cuts.
Tina Korbe is a reporter in the Center for Media and Public Policy at The Heritage Foundation.
