Half of Illinois Medicaid (for low income) enrollees found ineligible for benefits per  an outside audit.
 What! Anybody care?Â
Case study of Illinois:
In January, the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services, or HFS, began a new project verifying eligibility for Illinois’ 2.7 million Medicaid enrollees.
For years, state workers had failed to take adequate steps to ensure the people receiving Medicaid benefits were actually eligible for the program.
As an Auditor General report noted, state workers failed to verify basic eligibility criteria, such as income, residency and citizenship status. Worse yet, some of the annual eligibility checks had been delayed for more than five years.
So state lawmakers pushed HFS to hire an independent vendor who specializes in this kind of work to review Medicaid eligibility.
Since January, the independent vendor has reviewed nearly 419,000 case files of individuals currently enrolled in Medicaid.
 Of those, the vendor identified more than 210,000 that were ineligible for benefits, which amounts to more than 50 percent of all cases.
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