The federal government could save millions of dollars each year if it truly established Medicaid as the “payer of last resort,” a new audit has found.
Nearly one in seven people enrolled in Medicaid was also insured by a private company – a total of 7.5 million people – which should mean a large amount of government savings.
But a lack of data and coordination failures means that the government has sometimes paid medical bills that should have been covered by private companies, according to a report released Tuesday by the Government Accountability Office.
The vast majority of states reported that insurance companies had given them trouble when it came to insuring Medicaid beneficiaries, the audit found.
A total of 96 percent of states said insurers had denied claims “for procedural reasons” while 90 percent said insurers were unwilling to release coverage information or providing “incomplete or confusing information.”
The percent of Medicaid enrollees with private insurance is particularly high among seniors. Nearly 35 percent of people over 65 years old had private insurance in addition to Medicaid, compared to 12.4 percent of nondisabled adults aged 18 to 64.
GAO’s analysis used data from 2013, when only about one-quarter of states had expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. The number of people with private care in addition to Medicaid is likely far higher now that nearly half of states have opted to expand.