Medicaid backlog continues in new year

The state didn’t end the year well in processing Medicaid applications. Instead of eliminating a backlog, as state officials promised, the backlog has been growing again.

This delay hurts nursing homes and other Medicaid providers and can endanger the lives of vulnerable Kansans.

The problem with Medicaid applications has its origins in 2011, when the Brownback administration announced a $188 million project to replace the paper-based enrollment system. The new online system was supposed to reduce enrollment time to a day or two.

But a rocky rollout of the new system in 2015 led to long delays in approving the applications – as well as thousands of low-income Kansans being mistakenly denied Medicaid coverage.

The problems grew much worse when the Brownback administration decided to funnel all Medicaid applications through a single clearinghouse run by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment. That quickly resulted in a processing backlog, which expanded during a rush to enroll in the Affordable Care Act.

Soon there was a backlog of nearly 11,000 applications.

Federal rules require applications to be processed in 45 days. But in some cases, it was taking up to five months to reject or approve an application. That caused financial hardship for Medicaid providers and endangered the health of some patients.

The state responded by hiring more workers to process the applications. And after an embarrassing error – in which the state told federal authorities that it had reduced the backlog to 3,500 applications, when it had actually grown to nearly 15,500 – KDHE officials said they hoped to eliminate the backlog by September.

That didn’t happen.

Though the state was able to reduce the backlog to 1,486 in September, the numbers have increased since then – and recently totaled 2,247 applications pending 45 days or more, the Kansas News Service reported.

That has lawmakers – including Rep. Dan Hawkins, R-Wichita, the chairman of a Medicaid oversight committee – concerned about whether the state will ever eliminate the backlog.

The backlog has been particularly difficult on nursing homes, because about half of their residents rely on Medicaid to pay for long-term care, Kansas News Service reported. It has also made some nursing homes reluctant to accept new residents until their Medicaid applications are approved – which could put the health and safety of those individuals at risk.

Medicaid providers and lawmakers had expected the state to fix these problems by now. But it’s 2017, and the backlog continues.

This story was originally published January 4, 2017 at 5:04 AM with the headline "Medicaid backlog continues in new year."