Lawmakers want more info about Medicaid redeterminations

Health care providers, patient advocates and state lawmakers continue to hammer the administration of Gov. Greg Gianforte for removing more than 120,000 people from state Medicaid programs between April and November of last year, including many residents who say they remain eligible for coverage.

Every state is dealing with the post-pandemic redetermination process, but Montana has one of the highest disenrollment rates in the country, according to a KFF analysis, and 77% of the people who have lost coverage were kicked off because of paperwork issues or lack of a timely response, not because they were deemed ineligible.

In a Jan. 30 letter accompanying a public records request, House Minority Leader Kim Abbott, D-Helena, amplified a monthslong frustration among members of her party and others regarding the state health department’s lack of transparency about those redeterminations. The state’s public-facing dashboard tracking monthly disenrollments does not show the age, race, gender or county of the Montanans who have lost coverage, or the type of Medicaid program from which they were cut. 

“Lawmakers like myself and the Montanans we represent do not know how various communities have been affected by this process,” Abbott wrote. “We do not know whether all communities are represented proportionally in the tens of thousands of people your Department has stripped of health care. We cannot know if some of the folks who lost their coverage were aged-out foster kids who were forced to go through a red tape-laden process from which they are federally exempt, or parents who responded on time, only to find that your Department’s backlog cost them coverage.” 

Abbott’s request includes the same list of questions presented to the department by the Children, Families, Health, and Human Services Interim Committee in November. At the committee’s most recent meeting in January, health department director Charlie Brereton described the request as “very large” and said he does not have the staff or resources to handle it, but is willing to work with the committee to narrow the request.

The House minority leader slammed that response in her missive.

“You refused to undertake this redetermination process in a responsible way that would minimize coverage losses. Now you refuse to be held accountable for the damage your Department has done. Your attempt to excuse this behavior is unacceptable. If any private business ran this way they would certainly be looking for a new CEO,” she wrote.

A spokesperson for the state health department declined to comment on Abbott’s letter Thursday.

Mara Silvers is a reporter for the Montana Free Press, a Helena-based nonprofit newsroom, and can be reached at msilvers@montanafreepress.org.