The state of Alabama received bonus payments from Medicaid for 2009 and 2010 that were a stunning 13 times higher than the state was eligible for. So says the inspector general (IG) for Health and Human Services in a report released on Wednesday.
Instead of $7.1 million, Alabama received $95.3 million in performance bonuses related to the Children’s Health Insurance Plan (CHIP) for the years in question. As a consequence, the state now owes the federal government a refund of about $88 million.
The overpayment was not the result of a complicated series of errors or deliberate misrepresentation, but rather a very simple error, as the report spells out:
In other words, even children who qualified for CHIP for only a few months during the year were counted as if they were qualified the entire year. That means the number of qualified children was overstated by more than 90,000.
The IG choose to investigate the payments to Alabama because the state received over one-third (34 percent) of all such bonus payments to all states for 2009-2010:
It is unclear why this imbalance did not raise any red flags at CMS prior to the IG’s audit.
According to a report on the Alabama-based website al.com, the state of Alabama wants to work out a repayment plan for the $88 million with the federal government. The state’s health office Dr. Don Williamson is quoted as saying that he believes the state Medicaid “acted in good faith” when filing for the refunds.
Initially, Alabama disputed the findings in a May 2013 letter to CMS from acting Alabama Medicaid commissioner Stephanie McGee Azar:
The bonus payments were authorized in the Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2009 (CHIPRA). According to the report [emphasis added]:
