80% of Louisiana residents on Medicaid are ineligible, audit finds. 10% have 6 fig incomes

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Louisiana’s legislative auditor wanted to know how the state’s expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare was doing, so he picked 100 people who were deemed eligible under the rules.

He found that 82 of them made so much money that they shouldn’t have qualified for the benefits they received.

Auditor Daryl G. Purpera, who issued his findings last month to little fanfare outside of Louisiana, figured if those statistics hold true for the rest of the expanded Medicaid population in his state, then the losses to ineligible beneficiaries could be as high as $85 million.

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Two of the 100 people he examined were using Medicaid despite annual incomes exceeding $300,000.

Four other recipients had six-figure incomes. One of them, with an income of $111,785 per year, received $17,807 in Medicaid payments. Another, with an annual income of $126,284, spent 12 months on Medicaid and received nearly $11,000 in payments, according to the report.

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“Every dollar that’s stolen from the Medicaid system by a fraudster is a dollar that cannot go to help the truly needy,” said Nicholas Horton, director of research at the Foundation for Government Accountability.

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