Tens of thousands of Kansas kids are losing health care — over a paperwork problem | Opinion

A terrible thing is happening: Tens of thousands of Kansas children appear to be losing their Medicaid health coverage. And the really devastating thing is that many of them are probably still eligible to continue in the program — the problem, at its heart, is all about paperwork.

We know this because of a new report from Kansas Action for Children, a nonprofit that works on policy issues affecting kids in the Sunflower State.

“These kids can’t fill the forms out,” Heather Braum, KAC’s health policy advisor, told me. “They are reliant on their parents and their caretakers, and you and I can’t keep up with our own mail, right?”

Let’s go back to the beginning. During the pandemic, Congress did a good and wise thing: Medicaid beneficiaries must usually renew their applications for aid every year, but with COVID-19 forcing the country into lockdown, the government suspended that requirement — there was no good reason to kick Americans and their children out of a health program during the worst national health emergency in a century.

But the emergency had to end sometime.

Officially, that happened in May. And now states that administer Medicaid on behalf of the federal government are once again starting to require the yearly renewals. Kansas is one of them, via the KanCare program. A lot of paperwork that went undone during the pandemic now must be done again.

In a lot of cases, though, that’s not really happening. The new KAC report finds that 45,837 Kansans — nearly two-thirds of them children — have recently had their Medicaid coverage discontinued for “procedural reasons.” That means the paperwork isn’t getting filled out and returned to the state.

“These numbers sadly confirm our deep concern that Kansas children are at high risk of losing their coverage even if they remain eligible” for the program, KAC said in the report.

This might seem like no big deal. If losing Medicaid coverage is just a paperwork issue, why can’t those families just fill out the forms?

Braum told me it’s often more complicated than that. Many Kansans may be confused by the income requirements — children are often eligible for Medicaid even if their parents aren’t — or maybe they simply missed the notification that it was time to renew their kids’ coverage.

“They may be juggling lots of different life issues,” she said. “They may have moved around a lot, and even though they got their address updated, it still didn’t update. There are so many factors going into reasons why these kids are losing coverage.”

This isn’t just a Kansas problem. Across the border in Missouri, nearly half the 32,000 people who were kicked off Medicaid in June were children. Nationally, nearly 4 million Americans have lost their health coverage, again mostly for paperwork reasons.

“A lot of states are seeing these high procedural disenrollment (numbers) where paperwork is not getting turned back in for a number of different reasons,” Braum said. “It is not unique to Kansas.” (The Kansas Department of Health and Environment did not respond to my inquiry on this issue.)

The good news is that Kansans — or their children — who lose their Medicaid coverage for procedural reasons can reapply within 90 days. The challenge, as KAC noted in its report, is that national research has shown that many potential beneficiaries are simply unaware of the renewal process.

That means the time for outreach is now. KAC is working with its nonprofit partners to get the word out, but there is more work to be done.

“Any organization or entity that touches parents and kids needs to be mentioning that this is going on,” Braum said. “If you’re a provider that sees kids and families, you’re a health care provider, are you proactively able to figure out who your (Medicaid) patients are and reach them? Things like that.”

The health of thousands of Kansas children hangs in the balance. They shouldn’t lose their coverage because of a paperwork problem.

This story was originally published August 3, 2023 at 5:08 AM with the headline "Tens of thousands of Kansas kids are losing health care — over a paperwork problem | Opinion."