Colorado Medicaid Made Payments Despite Enrollees’ Deaths

Colorado’s Medicaid program made thousands of payments on behalf of beneficiaries who were dead, a federal watchdog agency says.

The US Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General on Tuesday released a report that investigated monthly payments made to the state’s Medicaid managed care organizations on behalf of beneficiaries who had recently died. The report found that between Jan. 1, 2018, and Dec. 31, 2020, the state disbursed over 100,000 payments to MCOs on behalf of enrollees who had died before the service date of their monthly reimbursement.

Managed care organizations are private health plans that contract ...