No, dead people are not receiving Medicaid benefits

People do not get paid any money for being on Medicaid.

There are no ifs, ands or buts about it. People do not receive cash assistance for being on Medicaid. They only receive health care.

Still, there are people, including some politicians who should know better, who either say outright or imply that people — even dead people — are getting paid for being on Medicaid.

That’s not the case.

In an August social media post, a headline from state Auditor Shad White said, “Medicaid going to dead people.”

In the video that accompanied the post, White said that his office found “over $600,000 in Medicaid funds being spent on citizens who have died but still remained in the Medicaid rolls.”

Such comments beg the question of how is a dead person receiving health care, which is the only benefit offered to Medicaid recipients? Perhaps more importantly, who are the health care providers who are doling out medical treatment to dead people and shouldn’t the state Medical Licensure Board investigate those doctors?

When asked about the social media posts, Jacob Walters, a spokesman for the auditor, referred to an article stating that in some instances large insurance companies were still being paid for Medicaid recipients who had died.

The insurance companies have what are known as managed care contracts with the Mississippi Division of Medicaid. Through managed care, the Division of Medicaid pays the insurance companies a set amount of money to provide the health care for the Medicaid recipients.

Apparently, in some instances, the insurance company receives a portion of that set amount of money for Medicaid recipients who already had died.

So, in reality, Medicaid, or more precisely Medicaid funds, are not going to dead Medicaid recipients or their families but to the large, out-of-state insurance companies.

And maybe it should not be a surprise that some of those payments were made to the insurance companies for people who already had died. After all, the insurance companies are being paid to provide health care for tens of thousands of some of the sickest people in the state, so in some instances when a person dies, the Division of Medicaid might not receive notification of that death before a scheduled payment goes out to the insurance company.

Could the process be streamlined or made more efficient to prevent or at least limit such payments from being made? Perhaps.

And perhaps Shad White, whose office is tasked with ferreting out waste and corruption, could offer and has offered solutions to the Legislature to make that process more efficient.

But as those solutions are offered, it should be made clear that dead people are not receiving any Medicaid benefits. Health care, which is all that Medicaid provides, does not help dead people.