Oklahoma House Republicans have sent the governor a bill dating back to last session to institute third-party Medicaid auditing.
Rep. Terry O’Donnell said the Oklahoma Health Care Authority’s regular checks are not robust and let ineligible people remain on the Medicaid rolls. Rep. Chad Caldwell said the health care authority reviews a lot of information.
"Employer match, eligibility number, insurance third party, those are all before. Then we do — I’ll skip for the sake of time … nine other checks somewhere between daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly," Caldwell said. "So, you mentioned that’s not a robust check. So, if you could help me understand what is a robust check and what would the vendor do that we’re currently not doing?"
House Bill 1270 requires a vendor go over information every three months, including Medicaid recipients' income, employment status, financial resources, death records and lottery winnings in an attempt to weed out individuals who are ineligible but still receiving benefits.
O’Donnell expects because the vendor will be paid out of the savings it finds, the quarterly audits won’t cost Oklahoma anything.
"In fact, I expect some savings. Now, how much that savings is, is totally up for grabs, but I will tell you that other states that have tried this have saved a very significant amount of money," O'Donnell said.
Illinois forecasted savings of $7 million to $14 million dollars for a similar program that discovered 14,000 dead people on its Medicaid rolls. But those savings were less than 1 percent of its Medicaid spending on the low end, and the program could end up costing $4 million to $10 million a year.
Rep. Forrest Bennett said if the legislature is looking to cut down on Medicaid spending, there are other places to look first.
"We have decimated our education funding," Bennett said. "We have made it incredibly difficult for those who are getting out of prison to get back on work, which makes their families reliant on public services. We have spread out the tax burden in this state so that it literally cripples low-income people. We turn low-income families into poverty-stricken families who require social services."
All final Senate votes last year and all final House votes this week for the bill came from Republicans. Four House Republicans joined all voting Democrats in opposition to it.
