114k Kansans lost Medicaid coverage in post-pandemic ‘unwinding’ review

Kansas Medicaid director Christine Osterlund updates the Legislature's Medicaid oversight committee on new initiatives to address a rocky rollback of pandemic-era protections. (Anna Kaminski/Kansas Reflector)

TOPEKA — More than 100,000 Kansans have lost health care coverage through the state’s Medicaid program since April 2023 after the rocky “unwinding” of pandemic-era protections, but the agency in charge of the review has seen progress recently based on incremental changes.

The state’s review of eligibility for KanCare, as Medicaid is known in Kansas, was plagued by havoc in its early months. Before the review ended in May, the process smoothed, and officials have now determined an estimated 114,000 people lost their coverage, Christine Osterlund, the state’s Medicaid director, told the Legislature’s joint KanCare oversight committee Tuesday.

Recent efforts to rework the KanCare website, bolster text message and email communication systems and simplify the eligibility renewal process have made a difference, Osterlund said.

Average call center wait times peaked at 24 minutes in April 2023, and they were at their lowest in June at 13 seconds. The most recent data showed average wait times in July to be just less than one minute. The agency also reduced the number of unsigned eligibility renewal forms from 1.5% to 0.06% in about three months just by moving the order of the signature page up in the packet.

“These are some early results, but I think they’re indicative that we’re on the right track,” Osterlund said during Tuesday’s legislative hearing.

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Medicaid programs were required to keep people continuously enrolled until the end of the public health emergency unless the person moved away, died or requested to end coverage. During that time, enrollment in KanCare increased from 410,000 to 540,000 people.

When the protections ended March 31, 2023, the state began to review KanCare eligibility for the first time in three years. Early in the review, participants and providers experienced a communication breakdown, technology troubles and overall confusion with the renewal process, which resulted in thousands unnecessarily losing their eligibility status , critics said.

Osterlund predicted in February that between 110,000 and 120,000 Kansans would lose their eligibility, so the 114,000 was well within the agency’s margins, she said Tuesday. April data revealed that at least 24,000 people of the share that lost coverage were children.

That data was based on old numbers, and a spokesperson for the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, under which KanCare is housed, told Kansas Reflector unwinding data will no longer be regularly updated.