Illinois Medicaid – Half receiving benefits might not be eligible
Waste and abuse? Just a little bit here and there. After a review of one-in-four Medicaid enrollees in Illinois, so far 25 percent of the total number of enrollees in the program were not eligible and have been kicked off.
The story is a bit confusing since the most important paragraph reads as follows. Just follow me here…
A review was ordered more than a year ago– because of concerns about waste and abuse. So far, the state says reviewers have examined roughly 712-thousand people enrolled in Medicaid, and found that 357-thousand, or about half of them shouldn’t have received benefits. After further review, the state decided that the percentage of people who didn’t qualify was actually about one out of four.
So, is the number 50 percent or is it 25 percent?
A state spokesman insists that the percentage of unqualified recipients will continue to drop dramatically as the review continues because the beginning of the process focused on the people that were most likely to be unqualified for those benefits.
On the first pass of the data, they figured half of recipients shouldn’t have received benefits, then it seems like they took another look and the number was more like one-quarter because some were classified incorrectly and getting the wrong benefits. Is that what they are saying?
[Ted] Dabrowski, a Vice-President of The Illinois Policy Institute think tank, spoke with News 4 via SKYPE. He said the Medicaid review found two out of three people recipients either got the wrong benefits, or didn’t deserve any at all.
OK, so now the Illinois government screwed up more than 65 percent of the Medicare applications?
We added so many people to medicaid rolls so quickly, we’ve lost control of who belongs there,” said Dabrowski.
No kidding.
After reading the poorly written article four times, I think I’ve figured it out. So far, the state has dropped 176,000 people from Medicaid. Since there are about 712,000 people enrolled, that means at least 25 percent of the enrollees were not eligible, and so far they have only reviewed 25 percent of enrollees.
The percentage will go up, but they say it will not go up linearly since they first reviewed people who were most likely to be screwing the taxpayers.
Oh, then that’s OK…
Follow up: Will there be any effort to recover taxpayer dollars that were provided to enrollees who were not eligible? Will anybody be fired? Who is responsible?
4 Comments
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Government expansion does not include weeding out the unqualified (and that includes illegal aliens).?? More people dependent on them equals more power.
As Obama continues to work his special democrat magic on the US economy and the health care insurance mess, I am sure that many more people will be turn to Medicaid, qualified or not. Hey, there’s no penalty for applying and as far as recouping anything goes, lots of luck.
On the bright side, all of those people found ineligible today can just apply again tomorrow!
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Very soon newborns will have their DNA taken for identity purposes and will get a unique tattoo for their gub’mint health care insurance.
No application necessary and no one will be turned down . . .
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?Once Obama takes away all of our freedom and finishes changing our country from what we all knew….. Where do we go? The Unites States of America is <was> the last bastion of freedom,it’s where the people from the rest of the world wanted to go and went. Can Jim or anyone answer where do we go?
The reason that response is there is I have not seen that question addressed anywhere.