Medicaid Not For All!

Need help with your Medicaid coverage? Too bad. Noted in August of this year, 16 states have call times so long that they have received warning from federal Medicaid officials. 

The ramifications of this issue may not be completely obvious either. Persons in need of coverage may not be able to receive it in a timely manner because they are unable to get help. 

The less obvious impacts are on those who work or have to care for others in the household. If a call center call has a significant wait, anything else the caller is doing is put on pause. The caller then has to make a choice: resume their activity and hang up or hope said activity can hold out long enough for them to get help with their Medicaid enrollment. More often than not, callers are giving up.

The highest average wait time was in Missouri at a whopping 48 minutes. Other states that are in trouble over wait times are not doing too much better, as Utah callers average a 35-minute wait time and in Nevada more than half the callers abandon their calls.

What is causing these long call center wait times? Of course, part of the problem is COVID-19, or rather one of the COVID-19 policies in which the federal government prohibited states from removing people from Medicaid during the pandemic. Generally, states will review eligibility annually, and to have not done that for roughly three years created a massive backlog. Which states are in trouble right now? The following states have received some sort of warning from the federal government: Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Maine, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina and Utah.

Are there any solutions to the wait times or anything someone who has been removed from Medicaid can do? Currently there are no solutions to the wait times, but there have been suggestions ranging from a call backlog (where you can "save your place in line" and the call center calls you back) to a tracker that shows the user what the wait times are, where they are in line, and what they need to do in order to keep their coverage. If your Medicaid coverage has been dropped, unfortunately it looks like you have to reapply.

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