Medicaid sign-ups pass half of eligible

The number of Arkansans who had signed up for health insurance under the state’s expanded Medicaid program last week represents more than half the number originally estimated as eligible, a spokesman for the Arkansas Department of Human Services said.

The number approved for coverage as of March 14 was about 58 percent of the 250,000 estimated to be eligible for the program.

Enrollment, which began Oct. 1, “continues to be a little bit higher than we expected,” Human Services Department spokesman Kate Luck said.

“We’re already halfway to our estimate of total people that would be eligible,” she said. “I’m not sure that we expected to get here so quickly.”

The number of Arkansans approved for coverage rose to 144,358 as of Saturday, Luck said, an increase of 6,549 from the 137,809 who had been approved as of March 8.

Of the total approved for coverage, 104,649 had enrolled in private, Medicaid-funded plans under the state’s so-called private option as of March 14, Luck said.

The ranks of the approved also included 14,338 people who were assigned to the traditional fee-for-service Medicaid program because they were determined to have exceptional health needs.

Thousands of others who were approved for coverage as of Saturday had not completed enrollment, Luck said.

The expansion of the Medicaid program, approved by the Legislature last year, extended coverage to adults with incomes of up to 138 percent of the poverty level - $16,105 for an individual or $32,913 for a family of four.

Since early January, applicants have been approved for coverage at an average rate of about 5,900 per week.

Luck said the March 31 deadline to sign up for private insurance for 2014 likely contributed to the uptick in enrollment under the expanded Medicaid programlast week.

“We kind of expected to see a little bit of a surge,” she said.

People who qualify for Medicaid - whether through the private option or the traditional program - can sign up at any time, but many people likely don’t realize that, Luck said.

Others may “just want to get it taken care of when everybody else does” or may not know whether the deadline applies to them until they start researching their options, Luck said.

Among those who don’t qualify for Medicaid, enrollment through the state’s health-insurance exchange has been slower. As of March 10, 29,427 people had signed up, according to the Arkansas Insurance Department.

That was an increase of 2,032 from the 27,395 Arkansans the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reported had signed up through March 1.

A report commissioned by the Insurance Department in 2011 predicted 115,925 people in the state who did not qualify for Medicaid would enroll through the exchange in 2014.

Northwest Arkansas, Pages 9 on 03/21/2014

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