Walz administration failed to produce Medicaid eligibility report, flouting state law
The Minnesota Department of Human Services (DHS) has failed to produce a report which documents the number of people who have been removed from Minnesota’s taxpayer-funded healthcare programs.
Back in 2015, state leaders passed a law which requires DHS to use a process called periodic data matching to determine if MinnesotaCare enrollees and Medical Assistance (MA) enrollees are eligible for those programs.
MinnesotaCare is a state-funded health care program for low-income Minnesotans, and MA is Minnesota’s Medicaid program.
In short, periodic data matching uses government databases belonging to the IRS and Social Security Administration to see if MinnesotaCare and MA enrollees are actually eligible for those two taxpayer-funded programs.
If an enrollee is flagged as potentially ineligible, they are given 30 days to submit documents proving eligibility. Should an enrollee fail to prove eligibility, then they are removed from MinnesotaCare and MA.
State law requires DHS to produce an annual report every Sept. 1 which documents how many people have been removed from the programs as a result of periodic data matching.
Periodic data matching began in August of 2018, and the first report on the findings was published on Sept. 1, 2019. That report said the process flagged 68,461 MinnesotaCare and MA enrollees as possibly ineligible between September of 2018 and July of 2019.
Of that number, 22,990 were ultimately terminated from those programs — 20,386 of those were terminated because they never responded to a DHS request for proof of eligibility.
The 2020 report said 49,753 individuals were flagged as possibly ineligible between July of 2019 and February of 2020. In total, 18,900 enrollees were terminated from coverage — almost all were removed because they did not respond to a notice from DHS.
However, periodic data matching was suspended in March of 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded.
The 2020 report noted that states needed to maintain Medicaid coverage for enrollees in order to receive federal assistance during COVID. A spokesperson for DHS said periodic data matching was suspended “to comply with COVID-19 continuous coverage policies.”
Periodic data matching would not resume until July of 2024. However, no new reports about the process’ results have been published since periodic data matching resumed.
A spokesperson for DHS said the agency has “not yet produced the 2024 report which would have been due in September 2025 and are working on gathering the data.”
Alpha News asked why DHS has not produced that report, but the agency did not provide a response. Additionally, the agency did not say when the 2024 report will be published. Alpha News contacted Gov. Tim Walz’s office for this story but did not hear back.
Former speaker of the Minnesota House calls for more reports
Last week, former House Speaker Kurt Daudt spoke extensively about periodic data matching at a meeting of the Fraud and Oversight Committee of the Minnesota House of Representatives.
Daudt said periodic data matching was an initiative he fought to implement during his time as speaker of the House. He noted that the program was “a hugely successful program. It found a lot of Minnesotans who were on programs who did not qualify — and that is fraud.”
When periodic data matching was suspended during COVID, state lawmakers placed a sunset on the requirement for an annual report. As a result, DHS will no longer be required to publish the results of periodic data matching after Jan. 1, 2027.
“I would remove that sunset,” Daud told the committee. “I can’t imagine why nobody would want to know the results of a program like this that’s in current law.”
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment