In December of last year, before the unwinding process had begun, one of their aides got a call from her office while she was at the Wells’s house, saying that Ms. Wells’s coverage had been cut off and that the aide was not to bathe or care for Ms. Wells that day — if she did, the company might be forced to drop the family as clients. They lost Ms. Wells’s care for nearly a month; Mr. Wells had to miss doctor appointments for his heart and kidneys, including his monthly catheter replacement, because he didn’t have anyone to stay with Ms. Wells. It was so difficult to schedule new appointments that after a few months he had to go to an E.R. to get a new catheter. He was later told that Ms. Wells’s coverage loss was a mistake.
But then it happened again in late June, after the unwinding process was underway. Once again, their aide got a call telling her she could no longer care for Ms. Wells, “just out of the clear blue sky,” Mr. Wells said. “I mean, I got upset.” So much so that he started having chest pains and difficulty breathing. Afraid he was having a heart attack, he ended up in an E.R. overnight, although it was more likely an anxiety attack. His sister went without coverage for a little over two weeks. The Arkansas Department of Human Services told him the coverage loss this time was the result of a computer glitch.
Both times Mr. Wells and the aide tried to reinstate the coverage on their own, but it took reaching out to a Legal Aid lawyer who had direct channels to state officials to get it fixed, an inefficient process that isn’t available to most people. Mr. Wells now worries that Ms. Wells’s coverage could once again get cut off at any time. “It’s happened twice in less than a year, so yeah,” he said.
He also knows their story is not unique. “There are more people out there just like Phyllis. They need this,” he said. State officials “don’t understand — maybe they don’t care — that they are actually hurting people, they’re impacting people’s lives.”
Outrageously, most of the Medicaid losses we’ve seen since the unwinding began are not necessarily because people are ineligible but because they’re getting tripped up by how complicated it is to stay enrolled. First, they need to know that they have to recertify to keep their coverage, even though they haven’t had to do that for the past three years, and to compound the problem, many letters from state governments about the new requirement go to the wrong addresses. Then they have to understand the letters they receive, many of which are overly complex, and then they must gather the right documents and fill out the right forms. If they need any help or have any questions, call-center lines are often jammed. More than three-quarters of Arkansans who were kicked off Medicaid lost coverage because they didn’t make it through that process, not because they were found to be ineligible, a rate that is just higher than the 71 percent rate for all states that have reported data.