By Shelby Gonzales, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
Connecting families to health coverage and other benefits requires comprehensive and strategic outreach. Getting people to sign up is hard work, and it often takes time to make measurable gains in enrollment.
One strategy has been extremely effective in enrolling eligible children. Using information available from other benefit programs to identify children who are likely to be eligible for Medicaid and CHIP and streamlining their enrollment in health coverage has resulted in sizeable coverage gains. In particular, For example, South Carolina and Louisiana have had good results in identifying uninsured children enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly the Food Stamp Program) for quick enrollment in Medicaid. These states used the Express Lane Eligibility state option, which allows states to use findings such as income eligibility from a program like SNAP to help determine children’s eligibility for Medicaid or CHIP. This strategy has increased enrollment in these states while significantly reducing eligibility workers’ workload.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have introduced a similar strategy for the upcoming rollout of the Affordable Care Act by offering states an option to quickly enroll or retain certain SNAP participants in Medicaid coverage. SNAP is an excellent source of information for Medicaid because states rigorously evaluate the income of SNAP participants at least every six months. We explain how this option could work in a new paper.
If all states were to expand, we estimate that this option would allow states to easily enroll about 7 million uninsured SNAP participants who are virtually certain to qualify for Medicaid. This strategy can relieve stress on state call centers, processing centers, online enrollment systems and navigators, which expect to face large volumes of new cases during the open enrollment season.
The option can also help reduce coverage gaps by simplifying renewals for Medicaid beneficiaries as long as their SNAP benefits are active.
Even the best conventional outreach strategies inevitably miss, or fail to enroll, substantial numbers of eligible low-income people. This new process seeks to overcome that problem. Of particular importance, it requires no trips to Medicaid offices, nor for individuals to furnish or caseworkers to process large numbers of documents.
We look forward to working with states and state advocates as they consider how this option could help them enroll millions of people in health coverage and reduce their administrative costs.
