The high-speed effort in Arkansas, where more than a third of the state’s 3 million people receive Medicaid, provides an early indication of the potential upheavals in store for the country as states review their Medicaid lists for the first time in three years. . These checks, once routine, were suspended during the pandemic, and their resumption across the country could result in up to 15 million people, including 5.3 million children, losing their health insurance.
While some states are working hard to create a safety net to insure people, whether through Medicaid or another health plan, Medicaid agencies in other states are facing pressure from GOP governors and legislatures to demand both complete this process as soon as possible.
“It doesn’t surprise me that we have a state like Arkansas — and now we’re starting to hear from other states as well — where the pressure to act quickly is going to be huge,” said Sarah Rosenbaum, professor of medical law. and policy at the School of Public Health at the Milken Institute of the George Washington University. “The end result of all this is what I expect – and look, [federal] The government expects a lot of people to fall through the cracks. I think the government has seriously underestimated how many people will lose.”
Sanders, who also introduced a new Medicaid job requirement earlier this month, is focused “on implementing bold policies that move people from dependence on government to lifelong prosperity,” the spokesperson said.
Arkansas’ shortened schedule — the shortest announced by any state — combined with the fact that thousands of people lost Medicaid when the state briefly introduced a work requirement in 2018, many fear that tens of thousands of low-income Arkansans who still have eligibility for Medicaid . lose access to their doctors and medicines because they do not complete the required paperwork.
“It’s a lot more than the job requirements, so it can be a lot more devastating. Job requirements were… just a few thousand people. That’s it,” said Loretta Alexander, director of health policy for Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families. “You just know there will be people who will fail.”
But Gavin Lesnick, a spokesman for the Arkansas Department of Human Services, said the state has learned from its past and is “confident” its plan will “appropriately protect benefits for eligible Medicaid recipients.”
“The Arkansas Department of Human Services has put in place a comprehensive cost-cutting plan that both protects taxpayer money and ensures that recipients who are still eligible and in need of Medicaid benefits maintain their coverage,” he said. “Our primary goal is to ensure that Medicaid resources are used correctly.”
During the pandemic, enrollment in Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance increased more than 25 percent to over 90 million as a result of a Congressional requirement that states provide ongoing insurance to people in exchange for additional federal funding.
The rollback of the program represents one of the biggest shifts in healthcare since Obamacare was launched almost a decade ago. And while Arkansas is the fastest to complete its spin-off, GOP legislators in other states, like Arizonaare also looking to see if there is anything they can do to speed up their work.
Still, national health experts are watching Arkansas with caution, in part because of its history with job requirements, which many see as a cautionary tale about how Medicaid recipients can be bogged down by bureaucratic paperwork and lose their insurance.
In 2018, more than 18,000 low-income adults were excluded from Medicaid for not showing they worked or participated in other work-related activities for at least 80 hours per month. Many have complained That the confusing system makes it difficult to follow the rules, and a 2019 study found that lack of awareness and confusion about the new rule led to a wave of layoffs, despite the fact that 95 percent of the approximately 140,000 affected people had to remain insured.
In a similar way, Recent Poll from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded Urban Institute found that 64 percent of adults in Medicaid-enrolled households have not heard of a return to the regular renewal process.
“I don’t think [the state] intended to deprive people of the coverage they were entitled to receive back in 2018,” Rosenbaum said. “But if the process is subjected to very strong expectations for speed, a lot of the bugs that we saw in the work requirements experiment — where people weren’t contacted or they couldn’t understand the contact, and the information was wrong or incomplete. — we’re going to see it all again.” .
GOP MPs, who passed a bill that would set a six-month deadline for completing the redefinition in 2021, believe the state will be able to complete its work on time and prevent eligible people from accidentally losing coverage. They argue that moving through the process as quickly as possible will free up Medicaid resources for the most vulnerable in the state.
“We want to take care of our Arkansans who really need help, but we also understand that we live in a budget-neutral state and we need to have a balanced budget, so we need to be smart about our finances,” the Republican senator. said. . . . . Missy Irvin, chair of the Senate Public Health, Welfare, and Labor Committee. “We want to protect these programs so that they are sustainable for the people who really need them.”
As Arkansas continued to do renewals and re-determinations during the pandemic – despite not being able to delist anyone from the states – more than 420,000 people have been identified who appear to be ineligible for Medicaid and must go through the process. extension by the end of September. to determine if they fit. Another 240,000 will go through the regular renewal process throughout the year.
Organizations that work with Medicaid recipients say the state’s temporary work – combined with the fact that the state began sending renewal letters to beneficiaries earlier this month, essentially giving itself a two-month head start – will likely make the renewal process easier. still a difficult task. It also means the state plans to implement CMS’s recommendation that states process no more than one-ninth of their workload each month for all but two months of the renewal process.
“CMS has long advised that states may have a large backlog of re-determinations pending. This is why the agency emphasized that it will take a reasonable period of time for states and territories to complete this work effectively, efficiently and in accordance with the letter of the law,” a CMS spokesperson said.
However, Arkansas hospitals, aware of the state’s past problems, are worried about possible loss of coverage.
“Most hospital administrators remember how it used to be – a huge number of people who did not have insurance. We had to take care of these losses and accept them,” Melanie Thomasson, vice president of financial policy and data analysis at the Arkansas Hospital Association. “Right now, those losses would be devastating.”
Groups such as Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families commend some of the steps taken by the Arkansas Medicaid agency to smooth out the rollout, such as improving communication between the state SNAP and Medicaid systems, translating documents for the state’s Marshallese community, and networking. organizations with which they have previously had hostile relationships, such as Legal Aid, which has sued the state agency Medicaid at least five times in the past seven years.
The state also hired an additional 350 contract social workers to handle the increased work, developed plans to manually deliver renewal packages to its most vulnerable Medicaid recipients, and opened a hotline so people can check and update their contact information.
Medicaid advocates in Arkansas also point out that, unlike in 2018, the redefinition is happening nationwide, led by an administration that has set barriers to the rollout process and is highly concerned that Medicaid recipients are mistakenly losing coverage. And they note that the state had years, not months, to prepare.
“I think they have learned from past experiences. Even before the job requirements were finished, you could see that they started to actually acknowledge the mistakes that had been made and were trying to figure out how to overcome the initial clumsiness they made when they introduced it,” Alexander said. “They understand what’s going on and how important it is and how many things can go wrong if they don’t get it right.”
However, organizations on the ground say the question is not whether Medicaid will lose coverage, but how many people who are still eligible for Medicaid raises concerns about whether the state will have enough staff to handle renewals and spends enough money on outreach to make sure people are waiting for their renewal letters and know what they need to answer.
The Arkansas renewal form requires a large number of details, including proof of income and a complete list of people’s financial resources, such as checking and savings accounts, property and cash, vehicles owned, medical expenses, expenses for caring for others, a complete list of household members, whether a child with an absent parent in their household, as well as the social security number of the absent parent. If you do not answer the questions correctly, you may lose your Medicaid coverage.
And watchers of the Medicaid closure process also remain concerned about the state’s ability to connect people who are no longer eligible for Medicaid coverage to low-cost or free plans on the federal health insurance market.
“We will have some people who have been wrongfully excluded from the program, but we will have many more people who are properly excluded from the program but may not be eligible for a subsidized plan in the health insurance market,” said Joe Thompson, President. and Chief Executive Officer Arkansas Health Improvement Center. “I think there has been a lot of focus on reviewing Medicaid eligibility. We haven’t made that kind of investment in terms of referring people to health insurance exchange plans.”