By Andy Marso
KHI News Service
TOPEKA — Discrepancies in immigration status data will cause about 700 Kansans who enrolled in health insurance plans through the online federal marketplace to lose their coverage at the end of the month.
Officials at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said earlier this month they were attempting to contact some 1,800 Kansans whose immigration status was in question because of data differences in their online applications.
he deadline to resolve those differences was Sept. 5. CMS data compiled on Sept. 14 showed that Kansas still had 700 enrollees with outstanding data discrepancies whose coverage will end Sept. 30.
“We’re glad they got ahold of 1,100 of the 1,800, but it’s unfortunate 700 are still going to have their coverage pulled,” said Katrina McGivern, a spokeswoman for the Kansas Association for the Medically Underserved.
About 57,000 Kansans used the online health insurance marketplace, healthcare.gov, to purchase health insurance last year. Coverage under the Affordable Care Act is only allowed for those who have properly documented they are in the country legally.
KAMU received the bulk of the federal grant money provided to train navigators to help Kansans use the federal health insurance marketplace. But McGivern said officials there were unable to do much proactively to help those whose coverage was in question because navigators are barred by law from keeping contact information for those they help enroll.
“There have been some people who come in and get assistance, but the effort to get this information back (to CMS) has been outside of us for the most part,” McGivern said. “It kind of goes back to the whole ‘we can’t keep their information.’ So we don’t know who to reach out to.”
About 1,700 Missourians also will receive notices saying their coverage will end Sept. 30 because of immigration status questions. That state had about 150,000 people use the federal site to enroll in a plan last year.
The data mismatches were a national problem, with CMS reporting almost 1 million such discrepancies nationwide as of May.
CMS outreach efforts helped pare that number month by month, and in August CMS sent notices to about 310,000 people who were still mismatched to let them know the deadline to provide documentation was fast approaching.
“We’ve made progress in resolving these cases,” said an email sent this week by CMS media relations. “We received hundreds of thousands of documents in response to the September 5 deadline, resulting in a decrease from 966,000 as of the end of May to 115,000 as of September 14.”
Those 115,000 — which include the 700 in Kansas and the 1,700 in Missouri — may have an opportunity for a special open enrollment period if they resolve their immigration status data now, according to the CMS email.
Otherwise, they will be unable to sign up for coverage until November, when the general open enrollment period for 2015 begins.
McGivern said her organization hopes that those who have their coverage canceled will work with navigators during open enrollment to get covered again.
Kansans did not need to use a navigator to sign up for insurance through the online marketplace, and it’s unclear how many of those with data discrepancies used a navigator last year. McGivern said problems with the marketplace website may have contributed to the data mismatches.
“When the website wasn’t working, there were issues that occurred with requesting different pieces of documentation more than once,” McGivern said. “There were various problems that occurred, so hopefully some of that gets worked out for the next time if that’s where the issues lie with all of this.”
CMS said it’s also in the midst of sending notices to about 279,000 households nationwide that had income discrepancies in their online marketplace applications.
Income level is key to the applications because enrollees are eligible for tax credits depending on how much money they make.
CMS administrator Marilyn Tavenner urged those who receive notice of income discrepancies to respond with proper documentation by Sept. 30 so her agency can protect the integrity of the tax credit program.
“We are committed to keeping coverage affordable for the millions of Americans who depend on it, and to doing so in an efficient, transparent way that protects taxpayers,” Tavenner said. “It’s critically important that consumers who still owe income-related documents to the Marketplace send them in by September 30 so we can continue to hold down their costs.”
Those who miss the Sept. 30 deadline may see their monthly premium costs change.
