The federal government incorrectly paid states hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses to expand health care coverage before Obamacare’s implementation.
The Obama administration erroneously sent $277 million to state governments that inflated the number of children enrolled in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). The federal government began offering bonuses to state programs to help cover the costs of expanded child coverage shortly after Obama took office in 2009. Over the next four years, the program paid out $645 million in bonuses, 43 percent of which turned out to be “unallowable,” according to a new report by the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services.
Miscalculations and administrative errors, such as counting disabled people as children in the total tally, drastically inflated the number of children covered by state health care systems, leading to chronic overpayment.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) distributed the bonus payments to states if they enrolled more children in health care programs than a baseline quota established by the CMS. The agency, however, relied on data submitted by the states to evaluate how many kids were enrolled. CMS did not double-check the figures. – READ MORE