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Ohio’s Medicaid system in trouble

A private business making mistakes on half the payments it makes would fail quickly. Your own household budget would not stand up to that sort of abuse for very long.

Yet Ohio’s Medicaid system, providing health insurance for more than 2.9 million low-income and disabled people, is that prone to such blunders.

Federal auditors checked the state Medicaid system, according to The Associated Press. “Among findings from an audit by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services were a payment error rate of 50 percent and a 43 percent error rate for determining Medicaid eligibility,” the AP reported.

Read that again: Half of the payments Ohio’s Medicaid program made to health care providers were wrong. More than two in five decisions the agency made about whether people should be enrolled in Medicaid were incorrect.

As you might have expected, the blame game is in full swing in Columbus.

Whatever happened to “the buck stops here?” The federal report was from fiscal 2018. What is the situation now? Have corrections been made? What is the current error rate?

Gov. Mike DeWine should demand swift, effective action to improve the state Medicaid system. If such steps are not taken, he may want to consider handing out some pink slips.

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