Welfare fraud

Townhall: The Welfare Fraud Pandemic & One Way to Fix it

/ Nic Horton / Leave a comment

It may not make the news every day, but welfare fraud is a serious problem – not only because of its volume, but also because of its impact on the truly needy. On the front end of welfare enrollment, lax eligibility verification by states has resulted in an unknown number of individuals signing up for benefits they don’t actually qualify for. And within the program itself, infrequent and insufficient monitoring has resulted in potentially millions of enrollees staying in the program longer than they should.

Enter: the welfare walking dead.

Across the country, thousands of deceased individuals have been found on state welfare rolls. And what might sound like a late-night punchline or a topic for a new AMC mini-series is a serious problem. This type of fraud, although easily preventable, steals limited resources from truly needy individuals who depend on the safety net to survive. Continue reading →

Townhall.com: Shocking Report Reveals Rampant Welfare Fraud in Arkansas

/ Nic Horton / Leave a comment

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.

Continue reading →