Health insurers received duplicate payments for Medicaid patients, WSJ reports

Health insurers received duplicate payments from the Medicaid system for covering hundreds of thousands of patients nationwide, leading to billions of dollars in excess taxpayer spending, The Wall Street Journal’s Christopher Weaver, Anna Wilde Mathews, and Tom McGinty report. A Wall Street Journal analysis of Medicaid data found that insurers, which are funded by state and federal governments to provide coverage for low-income Medicaid recipients, collected at least $4.3B over three years for patients who were already enrolled, and paid for, in other states. Publicly traded companies in the space include CVS Health (CVS), Centene (CNC), Cigna (CI), Elevance Health (ELV), Humana (HUM), Molina Healthcare (MOH) and UnitedHealth (UNH).