Laura Waddell, the health care program director for New Jersey Citizen Action, a nonprofit that has worked with the state to boost Medicaid participation, said she continued to be concerned not just about the growing number of people losing coverage, but the reasons for those terminations. In New Jersey, 77% of those disenrolled are for procedural reasons, she said, higher than the national average.
“We all must do a better job reaching this population and that begins with more transparency into where these populations are so we can better focus our outreach efforts to educate those communities on the process and provide renewal application assistance where needed, in order to help slow the churn and keep people from experiencing a gap in coverage,” Waddell said, noting that Citizen Action recently hosted a webinar to help explain the process. “We’ve been seeing that people don’t know what their rights are. We need to work together to keep people from losing coverage unnecessarily,” she said.