Illustration: Brendan Lynch / Axios
Hill Republicans are pointing to a new finding of duplicative Medicaid enrollments by CMS in an effort to highlight a crackdown on waste in the program.
Why it matters: Fighting waste, fraud and abuse in Medicaid was the justification for cutting $1 trillion of health spending in the GOP domestic policy law.
Driving the news: CMS said that it had found 2.8 million people who were either Medicaid recipients enrolled in more than one state or who were enrolled in both Medicaid and the ACA marketplaces. It projected that remedying this would save $14 billion.
- GOP lawmakers quickly praised the action, with Senate Finance Chair Mike Crapo saying it ensures "that taxpayer dollars are spent on the populations they were designed to serve."
Between the lines: Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at KFF, said it's hard to fully evaluate the findings without access to the data.
- One question is whether the numbers include brief instances in which people are switching plans or moving between states. "Those short periods of overlap work themselves out and are not a big systemic concern," he wrote in an email.
- He added there may be short-term savings from reducing or eliminating double coverage, "but not much in the way of long-term savings."
