Three Million People Who Applied for Medicaid During the ObamaCare Surge are Still Waiting to be Enrolled
The survey’s estimate of at least 2.9 million unprocessed applications is a conservative tally because some states didn’t furnish all of the requested information.
Thirty-six states rely on the federal insurance site healthcare.gov to transmit applications of people federal officials believe will qualify for Medicaid. Six of those states provided CQ Roll Call with the number of applications still stuck at the federal marketplace but couldn’t say how many people were covered. Eleven offered numbers for pending applications that had been transferred but similarly didn’t know the number of individuals covered in the paperwork.
It’s also important to note that the 2.9 million estimate is for the number of people waiting for their initial application to be processed. Some recipients waiting for a decision reapplied directly to the states and were approved. Officials in many states will have to spend additional sums to weed out duplicate applications and eliminate the risk of double-counting. (Roll Call)
Three Million People Who Applied for Medicaid During the ObamaCare Surge are Still Waiting to be Enrolled
In other news… about three million people who applied for private coverage in the Health Insurance Marketplace (i.e. The Exchange) during the Winter 2014 Surge have probably dropped their coverage because it’s doesn’t meet their needs.
Honestly, Obamacare will likely fall victim to the same problems that the VA healthy system encountered: long wait times and fraudulent reports. This is just another example as to why having a government run the healthcare system is NEVER efficient!
There are even long wait times for Medicaid eligibility, then just think of the wait times to see a doctor after finding one that takes Medicaid.
I have a friend who works for an insurance company that offers coverage in California and a few other states, and her sole job task is disentangling who has and who has not been actually enrolled. She told me that it is a painstaking process to go through hundreds of thousands of applications trying to find errors that keep people from being enrolled, while in the meantime people who have filled out the forms incorrectly (or had them processed incorrectly) believe they are covered but really aren’t.
In short, Obamacare is a logistical nightmare!
Insurers are actually the only responsible parties in the whole system. The navigators and government agents just went on a mad, pell-mell, rush to the finish line, so that they could hit the right number of sign-ups after March.
The insurers are left to clean up the junk information. On they other hand, they did ask for it.
The government thinks its health care system will function under the assumption that people are far more patient that what is realistic.
900,000 people in California are still on the waiting list. ObamaCare was just not a possibility logistically.