CORRECTED - NY audits Medicaid for out-of-state beneficiaries

(Corrects reference in quote in paragraph six to State Health Department)

ALBANY, New York, Aug 4 (Reuters) - New York's Medicaid program, one of the nation's biggest and most generous, is being audited to determine whether people who moved to other states are wrongly collecting benefits, the state comptroller said on Monday.

"People who are now out-of-staters shouldn't be entitled to the benefit," Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli told reporters. He was responding to questions about a report published Monday in the New York Post that said 30,000 New York City dwellers were enrolled in other state's Medicaid plans.

Medicaid is a federal-state program that provides health care for the poor, disabled and elderly. Unlike many states, New York forces the city to help pay for the program.

Medicaid was expected to cost the city more than $5 billion in 2008, according to the city's Independent Budget Office.

The state will spend nearly $35 billion on Medicaid this year, about a third of its total budget, according to the comptroller.

"We think that it is a very serious issue and one that the (State Health) Department needs to focus on, but I will leave the more specific details on what we are going to recommend when we actually release that audit," DiNapoli told reporters.

A spokesman for the city's Human Resources Department was not immediately available.

DiNapoli, noting his audits are often shaped by an agency's responses, declined to offer details, saying: "That audit is still in the oven. It hasn't cooked yet, so I don't want to get into more details on that one." (Reporting by Elizabeth Flood Morrow in Albany and Joan Gralla in New York; Editing by Dan Grebler)