Thanks to a bit of technology, mere citizens can watch many hearings in the state Capitol from the comfort of their own home.
For example, on Tuesday the House Subcommittee on Appropriations – Health, Mental Health, and Social Services, under chair David Wood (R – Versailles), live streamed its session with Department of Social Services leadership. The bureaucrats came to explain two issues: the dramatic decline in the number of kids on Medicaid, and, what the hell is going on with the DSS Call Centers?
Well, senior leadership – including two former Republican legislators now in top management positions in MO HealthNet – talked a lot but really didn’t provide information.
Chair Wood, along with DSS staff, said (repeatedly) that Missouri had failed to properly and adequately verify family income from tens of thousands of households. Performance was so bad that Missouri is at risk of censure or federal clawbacks of dollars. When the state started really reviewing information, those families rightfully lost coverage.
I’ve got problems with that…
♦ If state employees were following procedures as they did their jobs, only a very few honest mistakes in establishing income (such as not properly handling a year end bonus) should occur. If tens of thousands of mistakes were made, why didn’t supervisors catch and correct the mistakes?
♦ The family reviews came about due to the implementation of the new program software: yet, the new software collects the same information from the same forms as the dated software. Why didn’t the old software expose such a massive problem?
♦ Kids can be covered by MO HealthNet/Medicaid if their family has an income up to 300% of the poverty level – $77,000 a year for a family of four. How many families with incomes higher than that were even trying to get Medicaid?
What surprised me the most, alas, was a statement Rep. David Wood made several times, each time earning head nods from the bureaucrats. ‘Don’t parents have a responsibility to properly contact and interact with the Medicaid program?’
Yes, low-income parents in Missouri are expected to know the difference in FAMIS and MEDES generated form letters, make sure that when they call the state with an address change that the data is properly entered into all DSS data bases, and, realize that they probably should have received recertification materials in month X.
In other words, parents must be more expert in navigating the DSS’ 7,400 person bureaucracy than most DSS staff.
Kind of a lot to ask.
Oh yes, the session did glance on major problems with the Call Center. As I’ve noted, most months barely half of calls get to a worker, the others deflected into “we’ll call you back” near oblivion. Those in line wait, on average, around 40 minutes to get to a worker – who most pull up a complex file and handle the inquiry. Call Center jobs are so bad that some months more workers quit than the state can hire.
DSS’ Patrick Luebbering “said the department had ‘beefed up’ the call center in the past year, but that there was still work to do.”
Sounds like there’s a lot of work to do at DSS.
Glenn