More than 50,000 Hoosier adults and children have lost their Medicaid insurance in the last month, because during the pandemic, the federal government put a moratorium on removing people from Medicaid. Now, with the public health emergency ended, the government has reinstated normal procedure and is asking recipients to reapply every year.
Tracey Hutchings-Goetz, communications & policy director for Hoosier Action, spoke about the Medicaid challenges facing Hoosiers like confusing deadlines and instructions in the re-enrollment letter; and concerns about verifying income.
The Statehouse File reached out to the Family and Social Services Administration, FSSA, which oversees the Medicaid program in Indiana. The agency did not respond by press time.
Hoosier Action, a nonpartisan community organization from Southern Indiana, issued a press release on May 31, showing a Medicaid survey for these losses. The report, “Strengthening Medicaid: Challenges States Must Address as the Public Health Emergency Ends,” featured a look at states including Indiana, showing that 48.4% of Hoosiers reported challenges when applying for coverage, while 42.5 % reported challenges in renewing their coverage
Goetz said that the Medicaid Advisory Committee met a couple of weeks ago, and explained that, when someone is unenrolled for procedural reasons, it is because the committee was not able to verify the person met Medicaid’s criteria for enrollment within a deadline.
She continued, saying that a person will get notifications leading up to his or her deadline, however these can be “different for everyone.” She continued, saying that folks usually have around 30 to 45 days to get their paperwork in, but that they have a lot of challenges in doing so.
Goetz said Hoosiers could be helped by expanding the amount of time to provide information or documentation. She said that expanding the time to return materials from 13 days to 30 or even 60 days would reduce procedural disenrollments because people are sometimes disenrolled for failure to return paperwork within tight deadlines.
Although Hoosier Medicaid members are facing barriers to care, 61.7% of people who were surveyed said that they were either mostly or completely satisfied with the quality of care they received through Medicaid.
According to Hoosier Action, 88.5% of Indiana's disenrollments have been from paperwork errors, rather than actual ineligibility, showing the complications in navigating Indiana’s complex Medicaid programs.
One of the challenges Goetz mentioned was that some folks may receive a notice in the mail, telling them that they need to submit paperwork within two days of receiving this notice because the mailer is backdated to the date that it was originally sent.
The biggest complication Goetz raised was that the language in the state’s notice letters were “extraordinarily confusing, and complicated.”
Goetz gave an example of another challenge, saying that people need to provide their pay stubs to verify their incomes. To do so, an individual has to upload the document to the online portal, then it goes to a third party contractor that looks at a pdf and determines if that person provided the appropriate information.
“There is a possibility of error,...so the PDF file might be corrupted or the system might not be working, it might be hard to view, someone might miss read it… So there are a lot of possibilities for making mistakes because the program is so complicated,” Goetz said.
Another point she raised was how the Family and Social Services Administration, FSSA have been sending letters to people including multiple pieces of paper, where one will say “please disregard the other letters in the envelope.”
“It's incredibly confusing. There's a lot of letters. And so you can imagine how someone might start tuning out notices. Someone might be confused about what a notice says or someone might read a notice and say, Well, I'm already kicked off, I can't do anything about it. When in fact, they're just being told,... you're gonna need to supply this information by this date in the future,” Goetz said.