Sixteen-thousand Montanans lost Medicaid coverage in July, according to new data from the state health department. Counties in eastern Montana are seeing the highest rates of terminated cases.
A new report from the Montana health department obtained by MTPR shows that Petroleum, Sweet Grass and Garfield counties lead the state in Medicaid disenrollment rates. A quarter of the residents in those counties who had coverage in March had lost it by August. One in ten residents of Big Horn and Glacier counties have lost Medicaid. Those counties are home to the Crow, Northern Cheyenne and Blackfeet nations.
Jen Gursky is executive director of Helena YWCA, a shelter that helps women and kids at risk of homelessness. She said her residents should all meet Medicaid requirements by default, but four lost coverage in August and three others are waiting for a response to their applications.
She told MTPR she knows that the state health department is likely struggling with staffing shortages.
“But I also think that this was a policy that didn’t need to be enacted like this,” Gursky said in a phone interview. “And, it is having detrimental effects on the people it’s supposed to be protecting.”
The state is removing people from Medicaid more often than it’s allowing them to keep their coverage. More than 60% of people have lost coverage for failing to complete paperwork.
The data also show a growing backlog of cases the state is still processing, more than 25,000 cases dating back to May.
This summer, federal Medicaid regulators identified Montana as one of five states with long call center wait times, high rates of dropped calls and a slow response time for some new applications.
Health department spokesperson Jon Ebelt said in a statement that the department is working to improve the state’s public assistance helpline and that call wait times have decreased by 25% as a result.
The state has removed nearly 74,000 Montanans from Medicaid since April and has renewed coverage for about 58,000.
Copyright 2023 Montana Public Radio
