Finally!
Well, it took seven months – when it should have taken two or three – to get roughly half of those eligible signed-on to expanded Medicaid.
According to the April 2022 Monthly Management Report from the Missouri Department of Social Services for the Family Support Division and the MO HealthNet Division, by the end of last month 169,785 Missouri citizens were enrolled in the Adult Expansion portion of Medicaid. That’s better than double the 83,686 enrolled on March 31, 2022!
That’s the good news.
To be explained, how did a bureaucracy challenged to keep-up on routine paperwork manage to push-through more applications in one month than they did in the first six months of expansion? Plus, I’d like to see some clarification why the number of pregnant women covered went from 54,898 last April to just 34,320 this April: are women being shoved in to the Adult Expansion group to boost numbers?
By the way, those ‘new’ 169,785 patients cost the state $74,143,098 in April, $883.49 a head. That’s about $130 per person more than the overall program. The biggest portion of the cost came from Managed Care premiums ($42 million), hospitals ($16 million) and pharmacy ($9 million). Ironically, less than half of the enrollees – 83,921 people – received services. That means next month will see a tremendous jump in Managed Care premiums and other costs and the newly covered work into the system.
Wait a minute, you’re wondering how folks can be enrolled yet not signed-up for Managed Care or getting services? It’s Jefferson City, don’t give yourself a headache looking for logic.
Finally, a scary thought: if – as many predict – the country is falling into a formal Recession, how will the Department of Social Services respond when tens of thousands of people need to apply for help in a short period of time? Call Center wait times still get measured in hours.
Missouri April Benefits
2022 2012
Temporary Assistance
Children 10,867 68,597
Parents 3,051 35,610
Total 13,918 104,207
Payments $1,343,866 $9,429,170
Per Family $ 224.35 $ 233.06
Per Day $ 7.48 $ 7.77
Food Stamps (SNAP)
Participants 646,945 945,233
Benefits $105,646,242 $121,545,494
Per Person $ 163.30 $ 128.58
Per Meal $ 1.81 $ 1.43
Medicaid (MO HealthNet)
Enrolled 1,256,829 894,311
Covered 1,264,047 935,917
Payments $938,586,821 $652,531,683
Per Person $ 740.94 $ 697.21
Managed Care 969,176 443,690
Premium $ 301.85 $ 195.22
County Food Stamp Totals
St. Louis Co. 97,943 121,084
St. Louis City 61,487 108,261
St. Charles Co. 14,535 21,399
Interesting Factoids…
If Temporary Assistance payments had kept up with inflation, the average benefit would be about $9.00 per family per day.
Food Stamps issued in Missouri were down by one-third this April compared to 4/21.
This April Medicaid covered 686,484 kids – about 25,000 more than last April. Other subgroups are up too. The publicity around expansion has more people who were already eligible under traditional guidelines seeking coverage.
Glenn Koenen