Food Stamps: How Medicaid Is Causing Eligibility Problems for Potential SNAP Recipients — Is Happy Medium Currently Possible?
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Josephine Nesbit
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Government call centers are overwhelmed and struggling to keep up as states deal with a backlog of SNAP applications and Medicaid “unwinding” after the pandemic-era continuous coverage requirement.
Thousands of low-income families who rely on public assistance programs, such as SNAP, are waiting months for the approval of their application and renewal forms or to schedule interviews, which are a required step in the application process.
At the same time, states are going through the Medicaid “unwinding,” which is the resumption of Medicaid eligibility reviews for 87.4 million people currently enrolled in the health coverage program.
“The Medicaid unwinding has created huge problems for administrative staff,” Leighton Ku, director of the Center for Health Policy Research at George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health, told KFF Health News.
Most states rely on the same workers and computer systems to manage eligibility for Medicaid and SNAP, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. How difficult it is to sign up for public assistance varies depending on how each state sets up its programs and how well agencies are staffed.
In Missouri, the state is reassessing the Medicaid enrollment of more than one million recipients amid systemic flaws. State officials said they had “made significant strides to make interviews more widely available,” according to a recent case filing, such as by hiring “outside vendors to handle Medicaid calls to free up more state employees to handle SNAP interviews,” KFF Health news reported.
Montana is dealing with similar problems, and state officials said the Medicaid redetermination process was met with an already troubled system.
Charlie Brereton, director of the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services, told lawmakers the state was working to improve its public assistance helpline. Brereton also said the agency increased the wages of client coordinators to fill in-person positions and contracted about 50 workers from national agencies to help call center staff.
Last year, less than 80% of SNAP applications were processed on time in more than a dozen states, per U.S. Department of Agriculture data. Marketplace noted this was only true in one state before the pandemic.
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