A federal trial is kicking off in Jacksonville in an ongoing lawsuit challenging how the state removed people from Medicaid as part of its "unwinding" process.
The lawsuit, filed by several people who have been part of the Medicaid program against the top officials overseeing the program, centers on whether the administration properly notified enrollees about their termination from the safety-net health care program.
During COVID-19, the federal government increased funding to states for Medicaid but mandated that the states could not remove people from the program while the federal state of emergency was in effect. Congress authorized states to resume eligibility checks in Spring 2023. Since then, Florida has seen its Medicaid rolls go from 5.77 million people to 4.67 million, as of March.
The lawsuit was filed in August. Those who sued want U.S. District Judge Marcia Morales Howard, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, to find that the state's notices violated federal law and due process rights.
The lawsuit also seeks to prevent Florida from using its current notice process and reinstate the people who were removed from Medicaid until a new, more detailed process is put in place. Howard cleared the litigation for a class-action suit earlier this month.
Lawyers for the Department of Children and Families (DCF) and the Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) maintain that the way the state handled Medicaid enrollees was "permissible" and the notices were a "reasonable means of communicating."
They added that "the question for this court is not whether the notices can be improved, but whether they satisfy the baseline requirements of due process and Medicaid regulations. The state's notices clear these minimum legal thresholds."
Witness lists filed in court show that attorneys for the state plan to call employees and managers for both DCF and AHCA, including an assistant secretary for health care data and a DCF director for call services.
There are 4.16 million fewer children enrolled in government-paid health care programs after COVID 19-related coverage protections were lifted, according to a recently released analysis from the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy Center for Children and Families. Nearly 600,000 of those children live in Florida.
The analysis shows that Florida ranks second behind Texas in a listing of states with the largest enrollment declines in Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), better known as Florida KidCare. More than 1 million children lost coverage in Texas as that state unwound pandemic-related requirements that kept people enrolled in Medicaid.
No comments:
Post a Comment