Tired of waiting for states to reduce their backlogs of Medicaid applications, the White House has given six states, including Missouri, until this week to submit plans to resolve issues that have prevented more than a million low-income or disabled people from getting health coverage.
The targeted states are Alaska, California, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri and Tennessee.
“CMS is asking several state Medicaid agencies to provide updated mitigation plans to address gaps that exist in their eligibility and enrollment systems to ensure timely processing of applications and access to coverage for eligible people,” said Aaron Albright, a spokesman for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
He said the agency would monitor progress by the states in solving the problems getting people enrolled in the state-federal insurance program for the poor.
Rebecca Woelfel, communications director for the Missouri Department of Social Services, said 20,000 applications were pending.
“Medicaid applications are received on a daily basis,” she said in an email, “therefore, we will always have pending applications.”
But Missouri residents describe waiting months for their applications to be processed, and hours-long phone calls to support hotlines that don’t provide any support.
Woelfel said that as of May, 819,419 people were enrolled in Missouri’s Medicaid system, called MO HealthNet.
Since 2011, Mo HealthBet enrollment has decreased by roughly 10,000 a year. From October 2013 through this May, though, it dropped by almost 40,000.
CMS sent letters June 27 requesting the states’ plans to fix the issue and giving them 10 days to respond. Woelfel did not say how Missouri plans to respond.
All of the states relied on the federal online insurance marketplace that was established under the Affordable Care Act — with the exception of California, which set up its own marketplace. California and Michigan have expanded Medicaid under the health law, but the four other states did not.
California had a backlog of 900,000 pending applications in May — about half of them received within the previous 45 days. Although officials have not provided details on their plans for reducing the backlog, the largest in the nation, they recently said it had dropped to 600,000 cases. States typically have up to 45 days to complete the Medicaid enrollment process.
About 6 million people have gained Medicaid coverage since September, most as a result of the Affordable Care Act.
A Kaiser Health News analysis of 15 large states in June found that more than 1.7 million more were still waiting for their applications to be processed — with some stuck in limbo for as long as eight months.
The reasons for the problems include inadequate staffing, computer problems and other issues.