California is indeed the Golden State where Medicaid is concerned. The HHS Office of Inspector General (OIG) has found that, by exploiting Obamacare’s expansion of the program, California has enrolled hundreds of thousands of ineligible adults in Medicaid. Consequently, the state has bilked the federal government out of more than $1 billion in funding to which the state was not entitled. Indeed, these figures probably understate the amount of money that California officials have fraudulently extracted from the taxpayers. The OIG sampled a mere six-month period, from October 1, 2014 through March 31, 2015, to arrive at its damning assessment.
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Medicaid has become one of the most hotly debated issues in health reform. Almost all agree that reform is badly needed. In Congress, it has become a numbers game about millions of people and billions of dollars. One side decries the poor health outcomes that will derive from people losing coverage; the other argues that Medicaid desperately needs reform, not only to serve today’s recipients but also to effect solvency for future generations. Many are being told that empowering the federal government further is the way forward; conversely states, both red and blue, feel they can better serve their citizens if they were given more flexibility in managing Medicaid. How Medicaid is reformed is critical to the future of health care reform because it will form the template for the design of Medicare and private insurance going forward.
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