The Government Accountability Office routinely warns that states’ welfare programs are at high risk for waste, fraud, and abuse. A new report, released Wednesday by Arkansas’ Medicaid task force, brings these warnings to life.

The report highlights four key vulnerabilities in the state’s Medicaid program, a program originally designed to help truly vulnerable Arkansans. But it’s now clearer than ever that tens of thousands of other Arkansans – and even non-Arkansans – are benefiting immensely from the generosity of taxpayers, stealing limited resources from the truly needy.

Tens of thousands of Medicaid enrollees have out-of-state addresses.

According to the report, nearly 43,000 Arkansas Medicaid enrollees have addresses outside of the Natural State. Most of those addresses appear to be from neighboring states, none of which expanded Medicaid through ObamaCare as Arkansas did in 2014.

Rather than becoming a “good jobs magnet” as ObamaCare supporters had promised, the state is quickly turning into a Medicaid magnet – and not just for its neighbors.

In fact, several thousand Medicaid enrollees reside in states as far away as Florida, California, and Michigan. And nearly all of them had out-of-state addresses before they were authorized to receive Medicaid in Arkansas. Worse yet, the report identified 7,000 enrollees who appear to have never lived in the state.

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