Kicked off Medicaid: Millions at risk as states trim rolls
WASHINGTON — Days out from a surgery and with a young son undergoing chemotherapy, Kyle McHenry scrambled to figure out if his Florida family will still be covered by Medicaid come Monday.
One form on the state’s website said coverage for their sick 5-year-old son, Ryder, was denied. Another said the family would remain on Medicaid through next year. Still, a letter from the state said McHenry now makes too much money for him, his wife and their older son to qualify after the end of the month.
Three phone calls and a total of six frustrating hours on hold with Florida’s Department of Children and Families later, the McHenrys finally got the answer they were dreading Thursday: Most of the family is losing Medicaid coverage, although Ryder remains eligible because of his illness.
“I’m trying not to go into panic,” McHenry’s wife, Allie, said earlier in the week. The state agency did not respond to a request for comment.
The McHenrys are among the first casualties in an unprecedented nationwide review of the 84 million Medicaid enrollees over the next year that will require states to remove people whose incomes are now too high for the federal-state program offered to the poorest Americans.
Millions are expected to be left without insurance after a three-year reprieve during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the federal government barred states from removing anyone deemed ineligible.
The federal government requires states to tell people just 10 days in advance that they’ll be kicked off Medicaid.
Congress last year required states to submit data about their call volume, wait times and abandonment rate. The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will try to work with states where call wait times are especially high, an agency spokesperson said.
Some doctors and their staff are taking it upon themselves to let patients know about the complicated process.
Staffers at Adelante Healthcare, a small chain of community clinics in Phoenix, call families they believe are at risk of losing Medicaid. They put up colorful posters to remind families to ensure their Medicaid insurance doesn’t lapse.
That’s how Alicia Celaya, a 37-year-old waitress, found out that she and her children, ages 4, 10 and 16, will lose coverage later this year.
When she and her husband were laid off during the pandemic, they enrolled in Medicaid. Both returned to working in the restaurant industry, but Celaya and her children remained on Medicaid for the free health care coverage because she’s unable to come up with the hundreds of dollars to pay the monthly premiums for her employer-sponsored health insurance.
The clinic is helping her navigate the private health insurance plans through the Affordable Care Act’s marketplace and trying to determine whether her children qualify for the federal Children’s Health Insurance Program.
Advocacy groups warned for months that confusion and errors will abound, wrongly leaving some of the country’s poorest people suddenly without health insurance and unable to pay for necessary medical care.
Medicaid enrollees are already reporting they’ve been erroneously kicked off in a handful of states, including Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, New Hampshire and South Dakota, according to data gathered by the Associated Press.
Trevor Hawkins is seeing the problems play out firsthand in Arkansas, where officials said the state is moving “as fast as possible” to wrap up a review before year’s end.
Hawkins drives across the state providing free legal services to people who lost coverage or need help filling out forms the state mailed to them. He fields about a half-dozen phone calls daily from people seeking guidance on their Medicaid applications.
“The notices are so confusing,” said Hawkins, who works for Legal Aid of Arkansas. “No two people have had the same experience with losing their coverage. It’s hard to identify what’s really the issue.”
Some people received pre-filled application forms that include inaccurate income or household information but leave no space to fix the state’s errors. Others received documents that say Medicaid recipients will lose coverage before they get a chance to re-apply, Hawkins said. An Arkansas Department of Human Services spokesman said the forms instruct enrollees to fill in their information.
Tonya Moore, 49, went for weeks without Medicaid coverage because the state used her 21-year-old daughter’s wages, including incomes from two part-time jobs that she no longer worked, to determine she was ineligible for the program. County officials told Moore she had to obtain statements from the businesses — about an hour’s drive from Moore’s rural home in Highland, Arkansas — to prove her daughter no longer worked there. Moore says she wasn’t able to get the documents before being kicked off Medicaid on April 1.
Moore ran out of blood pressure medication and insulin used to control her diabetes and was staring down a nearly empty box of blood sugar test strips.
“I got a little panicky,” she said. “I don’t know how long it’s going to take to get my insurance.”
She was reinstated on Medicaid as of Monday with Legal Aid’s help.
