More than half a million Floridians have already lost Medicaid, and state agencies overseeing eligibility for the program say they still have to determine whether more than two million people will keep their coverage.
The Department of Children and Families and the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration have until March to decide how many of those two million are still eligible for Medicaid — health coverage for low-income families and individuals — after the continued coverage under the COVID-19 emergency ended earlier this year.
But after the state began disenrolling people in April, public health advocacy groups have criticized the coverage rate canceled over procedural reasons — not because they were ineligible.
The procedural cancelation rate in Florida is 55 percent, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation tracker of nationwide data.
DCF’s Deputy Secretary Casey Penn flaunted that 55% rate as being one of the lowest in the nation during a Wednesday morning meeting on the Senate’s Appropriations Committee on Health and Human Services.
In fact, “Of all people who were disenrolled, 73% were terminated for procedural reasons, as of October 2, 2023,” according to KFF’s tracker. New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Washington state and Hawaii had the highest percentages for people on Medicaid being terminated for procedural reasons.
“There has been a lot of misinformation and talk about what procedural terminations are and the impact that it’s having on Florida residents, said Penn. “As a matter of fact, we are ranked ninth nationally, and the eight states below us have been asked to pause their procedural terminations from. So, in my mind, we’re doing better than anyone else when it comes to procedural terminations.”
Procedural terminations happen when people do not complete the renewal process either because the state has outdated contact information or because the person does not submit the documentation necessary to determine eligibility. The rate of people who lost coverage because of ineligibility (15 percent) is lower than those who lost coverage because of procedural reasons (18 percent), according to KFF’s data tracker.
More than 50 organizations disagree with Penn’s assessment of Florida’s unwinding of Medicaid. The Florida Policy Institute, Florida Voices for Health and other advocacy groups sent a letter Tuesday to Gov. Ron Desantis calling for the state to stop the process of reviewing eligibility and reinstate Medicaid coverage to children disenrolled for procedural reasons.
“There are several issues that are causing families and individuals to erroneously lose coverage: long call-center wait times, inadequate staffing at the DCF, inaccurate and difficult-to-understand language in administrative forms that families receive, and inappropriate use of household income to determine individual eligibility. This loss of health insurance coverage due to procedural errors and inefficiencies is unacceptable and preventable,” the groups wrote in the letter.
The federal government requires that DCF uses available data to determine eligibility before asking people to submit a renewal form or additional documentation. When it comes to those automatic renewals, 29 percent of people kept coverage because the department went through the automatic process, according to the KFF tracker. Florida is the eighth state with the lowest rate of automatic renewals.
Senators in the chamber’s Appropriations Committee on Health and Human Services also raised questions about the number of children who have lost Medicaid coverage and the reportedly long wait times for assistance from the DCF call center. From April to September, 257,901 people ages 0 to 20 lost coverage, according to a House Democratic analysis of the AHCA’s monthly reports.
During that same timeframe around 67,000 children enrolled in Florida Healthy Kids, which covers children from 5 years of age through their 19th birthday, said Ashley Carr, Florida KidCare’s chief marketing officer. However, accounting for the children disenrolled from Florida Healthy Kids over the past months, the program saw an increase of around 25,000, according to the data Carr provided during the meeting.
Sen. Gayle Harrell, who chairs the committee, inquired about the three million in reserve funds DCF has available to fund its call center. Penn said that the call center was fully staffed and a dedicated phone line for the Medicaid redetermination process had an average waiting time of five minutes. However, the DCF call center, which takes calls about Medicaid and other programs, has an average wait time of over 30 minutes, he said during the meeting.
Florida Policy Institute’s CEO Sadaf Knight applauded the move to have a dedicated phone line but said in a press release after the meeting that the institute and its partners had not seen the new line publicized broadly.
“While we support the additional call center funding that DCF indicated they are requesting for fiscal year 2025, about $3 million is currently sitting in reserve from the Legislature to improve the call center for the current fiscal year,” Knight said. “We urge them to request to draw that down so that improvements can be made in the immediate term.”
Meanwhile, Democrats in the House urged last week for an oversight committee hearing on the Medicaid redetermination process. State Rep. Kelly Skidmore, a Democrat representing part of Palm Beach County, and Robin Bartleman of Broward County held a press conference on Oct. 6, saying that the House also had to hold accountable the agencies handling the process.
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