Advocates make case for simplified Medicaid renewal in Ohio

The keynote speaker at a day-long conference focused on improving access to uninsured children in Ohio said that in order for the state to ensure that more children are covered, it needs to streamline the application and renewal process for Medicaid and SCHIP.

Speaking at the Ohio Covering Kids and Families Conference, which was organized by Voices for Ohio’s Children, Ruth Kennedy, the Director of the Louisiana Children’s Health Insurance Program, said state officials need to be particularly concerned about inefficiencies in the Medicaid renewal process.

“You’ve heard that ‘it’s the economy stupid,’ well, with covering kids it’s the renewal, stupid,” she said.

Since 1999, Kennedy has overseen a transformation of the Medicaid and SCHIP enrollment process in Louisiana that is cited as a national model. In 1999 nearly one in three Louisiana children was uninsured. Now the uninsured rate for children is 5.4 percent, she said. From 2001 to 2008, the state went from not being able to renew 9,822 eligible children to not renewing 393.

Among the steps taken by Louisiana that Kennedy said could work in Ohio are to increase the availability of telephone renewal and to renew benefits in select cases where there is little chance that a family’s income has changed without even contacting the beneficiary, a process Louisiana calls “administrative renewals.”

Kennedy also said that states need to make a concerted effort to only require new paperwork when it is absolutely necessary, for both renewal and verification, and instead use the telephone and online technology as much as possible. By coordinating information between programs such as Medicaid and WIC, Kennedy said states can reduce the work that goes into verification and renewal and dramatically reduce administrative costs.