As soon as you’ve recovered from the thought of Obamacare’s forcing volunteer firehouses “to curtail their emergency response activities or close entirely,” here’s the following item in the Morning Jolt, showing another sizable problem with no solution on the immediate horizon:
Slight Glitch for Some New Medicaid Recipients: They’re Not Covered.
Hey, remember when they told us the site was fixed? Yeah, not so much.
People shopping for insurance on the federal marketplace may be informed they’re eligible for Medicaid and that their information is being sent to state officials to sign them up. However, states aren’t able enroll them because they’re not receiving usable data from the Obama administration.
The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services wrote a memo to the 36 states using the federal website last week acknowledging the information wasn’t being transferred automatically and saying another system was being developed to send it. More complete files could be sent as soon as next week.
The problem with Medicaid coordination could affect tens of thousands of applicants and represents the latest issue to arise in the rollout of a website that’s been plagued with long waits for users and other glitches.
Sometimes you just have to gasp, and marvel, and the epic scale of the maelstrom that is bearing down upon ordinary Americans:
Some users who fill out applications on the federal site may believe that they’re already being enrolled in Medicaid or that state officials will contact them, even though the agencies aren’t receiving the information they need, said Matt Salo, executive director of the National Association of Medicaid Directors. The data transfer problem is occurring in the 36 states where the federal site is deployed, regardless of whether they chose to expand Medicaid.
“Essentially, if you’re a consumer on healthcare.gov, it will tell you you’re eligible for Medicaid and the state agency will take care of it, but there’s no real way for the state Medicaid agency to know anything about it,” said Salo, who leads the nonpartisan membership group for state Medicaid chiefs.
Think about it, the new Medicaid patients are supposed to be the ones happy under the new system. Let’s look at the folks getting a worse deal . . .