QUINCY, Mass. (AP) – Medicaid erroneously paid $1 million in medical bills in the last three years to Massachusetts residents who were already dead, according to the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The agency, which oversees state Medicaid programs, sampled records of claims for Massachusetts recipients who had died and found mistaken payments in more than half, according to the report issued in January and made public last week.

State Medicaid director Beth Waldman said in a letter to federal officials that the report overestimated the error, but said the state is “strengthening” its claims review system.

The state, which had previously checked state death records monthly, now checks Social Security death records daily to try and eliminate errors, Medicaid spokesman Richard Powers said.

“I don’t want to diminish what the report says,” Powers told The Patriot Ledger of Quincy. “Still, we’re talking about $1 million over a three-year period in a budget that totaled $18 billion. Even with that, we must be held accountable for every taxpayer dollar received, and we take it seriously and we think we’ve taken steps to eliminate this problem in the future.”

The state will recover all the overpayments identified in the report and will also examine earlier claims for errors, Powers said. The state and the federal government each pay half of the cost of Medicaid, which covers medical bills for low-income people.

Auditors for the inspector general matched Social Security and state death certificate records against Medicaid recipients for October 1998 through September 2001.

The comparison to Social Security records turned up 10,725 claims totaling $2 million that appeared to cover treatment after patients had died.

Auditors looked more closely at a sample of 100 claims. Fifty-two were for treatment dated after the patients died, the report said. The state caught only one of the errors.

Another 47 bills were for people who turned out to be alive or whose death could not be confirmed, the report said.

“As a result, we estimate that unrecovered overpayments were $1,007,431,” the report said.

AP-ES-03-12-05 1814EST