WCCF has been arguing all year that Wisconsin shouldn’t push 90,000 people off BadgerCare in December – at the same time that hundreds of thousands of uninsured Wisconsinites are trying to enroll in the new insurance Marketplace. Also at that time, about 25,000 people now in the state’s high risk pool will have to try to buy coverage through the new Marketplace – adding to the to the logjam of applications.
Expecting that many people to get the assistance they need to explore their options, choose the right plan for their family, and pay their first premium before December 15 seemed to us to be a recipe for very substantial problems, even if the state and federal computer systems were working properly. Unfortunately, the online version of the federal Marketplace has had extensive problems getting going, and the state doesn’t anticipate having its computer programing done until late November. Even then, the state concedes that it won’t be able to correctly determine eligibility for many of the people that it will remove from BadgerCare at the end of the year. (See this WCCF blog post.)At about the beginning of December, tens of thousands of BadgerCare participants will get termination letters from the state saying they have until December 15 to reapply through the Marketplace, verify their eligibility, and pay their first premium for private coverage. The state seems relatively unconcerned that some of the people receiving those notices will actually be below the poverty level under the new eligibility standards – arguing that they can be restored to BadgerCare coverage when they apply to the Marketplace. Yet even if the federal computer problems are resolved in the next couple of weeks, expecting all the people being removed from BadgerCare to navigate the new enrollment process by December 15 seems extremely unrealistic.
For those reasons and others, an editorial this week in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel endorsed WCCF’s recommendation that “legislators should change the law so they can delay by a couple of months when the 92.000 people are moved from BadgerCare to private plans.” As the editorial states: “That would immediately lower the number of people trying to sign up for insurance on the exchange and give state officials more time to ensure people are properly transitioned from BadgerCare to private plans.”
We still strongly support the Affordable Care Act, which has already made substantial improvements, such as greatly expanding access to insurance for young adults, removing coverage restrictions in private insurance, and removing fees for preventive care. It’s extremely frustrating that computer problems are delaying the process of giving people access to coverage through the new Marketplace, but those issues are similar to the challenges that created rough going for the Medicare prescription drug coverage in its early stages.
The computer problems will eventually be sorted out, but in the meantime state lawmakers could and should change the timing of the changes to BadgerCare, in order to take some pressure off the snarled application process and avoid substantially increasing the number of uninsured Wisconsinites.
Jon Peacock
