The following article was submitted by Sixth District Delegate Robin Grammer about regarding public benefit fraud and abuse in Maryland.
Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, and other social welfare programs exist to give our society’s most vulnerable assistance to get back on their feet. Recently, however, Maryland’s social programs have been inundated by rampant fraud and abuse, hiking costs for taxpayers and preventing the genuinely needy from receiving vital aid.
Under new federal provisions, states will have to pay a portion of the cost for SNAP, more commonly known as food stamps, if they have a payment error rate above six percent. Maryland has blown past that limit with an error rate of almost fourteen percent, ranking among the ten worst states in the nation in program integrity. Because of that error rate, which is derived almost entirely from overpayments, taxpayers are on the hook for fifteen percent of the program’s cost, totaling about two hundred and forty million dollars in extra spending.
This issue goes far beyond innocuous terms like “mistake” or “administrative error.” Maryland taxpayers are being robbed. Just last year, Democrats attempted to close a self-induced budget deficit by raising taxes and fees on Marylanders by almost two billion dollars in one year. The problem is back with a new projected budget deficit of around one and a half billion dollars – there’s no telling what taxes our government might raise to pay for it. Property tax assessments are expected to increase radically in the coming fiscal year.
Make no mistake, if our leaders in Annapolis had taken their heads out of the sand and cracked down on this unacceptable fraud, our deficit would be hundreds of millions of dollars less, and our hardworking taxpayers would have room to breathe.
The unnecessary cost brought on by these errors is not only monetary, however; it is human. The Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan investigative agency for the United States Congress, determined that Maryland failed to meet program integrity guidelines for seventeen out of twenty randomly selected Medicaid redeterminations. At the same time, the Kaiser Family Foundation reports that our state has almost forty thousand people with disabilities on the Medicaid waiting list.
Every dollar that is spent on someone who is not truly eligible for these programs, whether it be Medicaid or SNAP, is a dollar stolen from someone who truly needs it. It is not an exaggeration to say that this level of waste costs lives.
Unfortunately, Democrats in Annapolis who caused these problems are the first to skirt responsibility for it, blaming the Trump administration for actual accountability measures. In fact, our state’s attorney general has gone as far as to sue the federal government to block their attempts to root out fraud and abuse in the SNAP system.
David Williams, a renowned advocate for taxpayers, says that the fault for this fiasco lies in the legislature. I couldn’t agree more. No matter how much our leaders deny it, the fact of the matter is that this is a problem that was created in Annapolis and it needs to be solved in Annapolis.
In the upcoming legislative session, I will be sponsoring legislation to fight back against this wave of abuse and fraud by putting in place integrity measures for our state’s public benefit programs. Those prohibited by law – such as illegal aliens – should not be receiving public benefits solely because nobody will enforce the law. The dead should not receive public benefit checks. The multi-state benefit enrollment scam needs to end. Working aged men enrolled in violation of the law must be removed.
The average working Maryland cannot afford their own bills and the bills of those fraudulently living on the system. Those – such as Governor Moore – who are allowing these institutions to violate Maryland taxpayers and abandon those truly in need are failing to serve us.
In Minnesota, a fraud scandal was enough to disgrace the incumbent governor and end his campaign for reelection. In Maryland, I believe that waste and fraud of a similar scale should at the very least warrant real action to ensure that taxpayer dollars go towards those who need it, not those who don’t, and certainly not those trying to cheat the system. Failure to do so would be nothing less than a betrayal to the people of our state.
