Medicaid services for the dead.

Kaisernetwork.org's daily report mentions an article in the Memphis Commerical Appeal that Medicaid auditors have found 1,997 instance over the past five years in which the Medicaid program was charged $159,896 for services provided to patients who had died. Some or all of this might be computer error (at least faulty data entry) but any cases that are accurately reported obviously fall outside the standard of "medically necessary" care. Patients who are "brain dead" continue to receive services if they are organ donors, but those expenses are paid by the Organ Procurement Organization, not by health insurance programs (public or private). Brain dead patients will sometimes remain on life-support in the hospital for hours or sometimes days, until the family is more comfortable with the concept or more accepting of their loss, or until out-of-town family members can assemble at the bedside. I've always assumed that hospitals eat those charges rather than try to get reimbursed for them, and in any event, if this were the explanation, there'd be more money involved than $80 per patient (on average). So either Tennessee has a lot of data entry clerks who need to be retrained (or a lot of forms that need to be reformatted) or it's literally pay-back time for these hospitals.