On March 3, 2025, Paragon and EPIC’s joint policy brief on Medicaid improper payments was referenced in STAT.
From the article:
They’re getting crucial new support for that effort from influential conservative think tanks the Paragon Health Institute and the Economic Policy Innovation Center. On Monday they released a paper estimating that Medicaid made about $1.1 trillion in improper payments over the past decade, and arguing that policies to lower that figure could save hundreds of billions of dollars.
That’s a far higher estimate than that of the government agency that oversees Medicaid, but Paragon President Brian Blase, who co-authored the analysis, said that’s because the government has rarely included reviews of whether people are actually eligible for Medicaid in its calculations of improper payments. In the two years that the government included eligibility reviews, 2019 and 2020, it calculated an improper payment rate above 25% each year. Paragon applied the same rate to the past decade of Medicaid spending to arrive at its $1.1 trillion estimate.
“You can reduce waste, fraud, and abuse by well more than $880 billion,” Blase said in an interview, referring to the savings goal assigned to the Congressional committee responsible for Medicaid as part of the GOP’s tax cut plans.
The full article can be found in STAT.
