“Just not knowing how much longer this will be in place is creating significant challenges,” Tolbert said. While states are accustomed to some level of uncertainty from the federal government, Jennifer Tolbert, director of state health reform at the Kaiser Family Foundation, said this is a unique situation. Start too late, and states might not have the infrastructure in place to help hundreds of thousands of residents re-enroll in Medicaid or transition to coverage on state health insurance exchanges. Start the process too early, and states worry they’ll be paying for resources they don’t yet need and wasting what might be the one shot they have to communicate with a vulnerable population. “That’s really one of the big risks, that people will be eligible but become unenrolled just because they don’t get the message and don’t know how to continue their coverage and are just out of the habit, quite honestly, of doing renewals and redeterminations after almost two years,” said Suzanne Bierman, administrator of Nevada’s Medicaid program. State health officials say a firm date would allow them to hire and train additional staff amid an ongoing workforce shortage, build out call center capacity to limit wait times and conduct outreach campaigns with local community organizations to ensure enrollees know they need to provide certain information to the state to keep their coverage. “So maybe, just maybe, we are a canary in the coal mine, or maybe, just maybe, we are a cautionary tale for some other states on what needs to happen,” Nelson told the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission last week. More than 41 percent of the 15,000 kids enrolled in Utah’s program lost their health insurance during the redetermination process - despite the state’s efforts to reach out to people, update addresses and send out notifications in advance. Utah, which undertook a similar effort last year for its Children’s Health Insurance Program, offers a preview of what the rest of the country could experience. “We are pulling out all the stops,” Tsai said. “Most of us go to sleep at night thinking about this and what we can do the next day around this,” said Daniel Tsai, director of the Center for Medicaid and CHIP Services, describing the level of engagement across HHS and CMS on this issue as “unprecedented.” It’s a problem not just for states but for the Biden administration, which might be forced to grapple with rising uninsured rates in an election year. Now, states fear that unwinding the expanded social safety net could prove messy - as many of the millions removed from the rolls may not know they’ve lost their health insurance or which options are available for new coverage. Enrollment surged nearly 20 percent over the next 16 months to 76.7 million, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, an all-time high. But when the pandemic began, Congress, in exchange for additional federal funding, barred states from kicking people off Medicaid. People typically lose Medicaid coverage because their income increases above the eligibility threshold, or they fail to submit the proper paperwork to prove they qualify. State officials are also asking federal lawmakers for more money and eyeing additional requirements for the unwinding effort, which some say could safeguard against pressures from state lawmakers to expedite the process in order to save money and remove people from welfare rolls as soon as possible. The Biden administration recently extended the public health emergency another three months, through April 15, but the White House is likely to allow it to expire once Covid-19 cases wane and vaccinations increase.Ĭongress could help, they say, if it decouples the requirement to keep people on state Medicaid rolls from the public health emergency and sets a date for when the pandemic-era policy will end. “It’s hard for us to not know what’s going to happen.” I am not sure if I qualify Medicaid.“There’s not a lot of runway here,” Jeff Nelson, director of Utah’s Bureau of Eligibility Policy, told POLITICO. If people want local assistance to apply and enroll they start at so they can get an appointment with a local Kōkua (navigators) and finding a local enrollment event. To apply and enroll, people can go directly to. Here are the important deadlines for enrollment:įor coverage to start Januenroll by December 15, 2015įor coverage to start February 1, 2016, enroll by January 15, 2016įor coverage to start March 1, 2016, enroll by January 31, 2016 Open enrollment starts on November 1, 2105. When people reenroll, their identifies will be verified and protected. Hawaii Health Connector cannot transfer its clients’ identifying information to because of strict security protocols. It is very important to know that everyone who has coverage through the Hawaii Health Connector today will have to reenroll.
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