Kim Adair-MacPherson is the auditor general of New Brunswick. (Submitted/Office of the Auditor General)
In her report, provincial auditor general Kim MacPherson placing of focus on the distribution of Medicare cards.
As of March 2018, there were 765,000 active medicare cards, that’s more cards than New Brunswick has people.
MacPherson says two service level agreements cover medicare cards through Service New Brunswick and Medavie Blue Cross.
In 2013, Medavie Blue Cross took over production and distribution for new cards and replacement cards.
“Now to give you an idea of volume, Medavie distributes in the range of up to 17,000 cards each month day through Canada Post.” MacPherson said.
Among the conclusions, MacPherson says the initial registration process is similar to other provinces and the applications are either approved or rejected in a timely manner but, they found the methods used to identify cardholders who become ineligible were insufficient.
She says the department could not fully explain why there were more active Medicare cards than New Brunswick residents.
“For example; in 2016, there were over 10,000 more active cards than New Brunswick residents. The Department (of Health) struggled to explan why that was.”
MacPherson says they found that Medicare does not access card usage patterns to identify ineligible Medicare cards by using reports which detail a lack of usage over a significant period of time.
Follow
