Auditors find significant percentage of people applying for Obamacare Medicaid expansion should have been denied as ineligible

Washington Times:

Louisiana’s legislative auditor wanted to know how the state’s expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare was doing, so he picked 100 people who were deemed eligible under the rules.

He found that 82 of them made so much money that they shouldn’t have qualified for the benefits they received.

Auditor Daryl G. Purpera, who issued his findings last month to little fanfare outside of Louisiana, figured if those statistics hold true for the rest of the expanded Medicaid population in his state, then the losses to ineligible beneficiaries could be as high as $85 million.

“This is huge. It really is,” he told The Washington Times. “As more and more state auditors realize what this is doing to them, it’s going to come to a point where all 50 of them are going to have to declare they can no longer say the state’s books are accurate. I really do believe that day is coming.”

Louisiana may be an outlier. A federal inspector general’s report this year found 38 out of a sample of 150 Medicaid beneficiaries in California were potentially ineligible. Taken statewide, that would mean more than 350,000 questionable customers.

Another report estimated nearly 50,000 questionable beneficiaries in New York.

The federal inspector general was looking broadly at eligibility, including residency problems and other disqualifications.

In Louisiana, Mr. Purpera obtained income data from the state’s workforce commission and compared it with what Medicaid customers told the health department they were making to qualify for the benefit.

He concluded that some should never have been approved at all and most were lowballing their income at some point and should have been kicked out of the program for at least part of the time they were claiming benefits.

Two of the 100 people he examined were using Medicaid despite annual incomes exceeding $300,000.

Four other recipients had six-figure incomes. One of them, with an income of $111,785 per year, received $17,807 in Medicaid payments. Another, with an annual income of $126,284, spent 12 months on Medicaid and received nearly $11,000 in payments, according to the report.

“The report is stunning. It is breathtaking. There are not words in English to describe what our legislative auditor found,” said Sen. John Kennedy, Louisiana Republican. “The Department of Health just threw the money in the dirt.”
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I think Obamacare was set up to allow such illegal uses of federal funds.  Those who lied about their income should be considered for prosecution by defrauding the federal government and taxpayers.  Unfortunately, Louisiana has a history of these kinds of shenanigans and it looks like California has more than its share of scammers now.