States Face Another Challenge With Medicaid Work Rules: Staffing Shortages

Katie Crouch says calling her state’s Medicaid agency to get information about her benefits can feel like a series of dead ends. “The first time, it’ll ring interminably.

Next time, it’ll go to a voice mail that just hangs up on you,” said the 48-year-old, who lives in Delaware. “Sometimes you’ll get a person who says they’re not the right one.

They transfer you, and it hangs up. Sometimes, it picks up and there’s just nobody on the line.” She spent months trying to figure out whether her Medicaid coverage had been renewed.

As of late March, she hadn’t been reapproved for the year for the state-federal program, which provides health insurance for people with low incomes and disabilities. Crouch, who suffered a debilitating brain aneurysm a decade ago, also has Medicare, which covers people who are 65 or older or have disabilities.

Medicaid had been paying her monthly Medicare deductibles of $200, but she’d been on the hook for them for the past three months, straining her family’s fixed income, she said.