U.S. to End Coverage Under Health Care Law for Tens of Thousands
By ROBERT PEAR
SEPT. 15, 2014 - New York Times
WASHINGTON — The Obama
administration said on Monday that it planned to terminate health insurance for
115,000 people on Oct. 1 because they had failed to prove that they were United
States citizens or legal immigrants eligible for coverage under the Affordable
Care Act. It also told 363,000 people that they could lose financial aid because
their incomes could not be verified.
The 115,000 people gwill lose their
coverage as of Sept. 30,h said Andrew M. Slavitt, the No. 2 official at the
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which runs the federal insurance
marketplace.
Some of them may be able to have
their coverage reinstated retroactively if they produce the documents that they
were repeatedly asked to provide in recent months, Mr. Slavitt said.
At the end of May, the
administration said, 966,000 people were found to have discrepancies in their
immigration and citizenship records. Most sent in documents as requested. In
mid-August, the administration sent letters to about 310,000 people who had
failed to respond. They were supposed to submit documents by Sept. 5, but the
115,000 consumers failed to do so, Mr. Slavitt said.
Many consumers and lawyers who
work with them said that they had tried to submit immigration and citizenship
papers, but that they experienced problems transmitting documents through HealthCare.gov. Other people said
they sent the documents by mail to a federal contractor in Kentucky but never
heard back from the contractor or the government.
gWe heard from lots of consumers
who told us they sent in their documents multiple times or tried to upload them
through HealthCare.gov,h said Mara Youdelman, a lawyer at the National Health
Law Program, an advocacy group for low-income people.
Jenny Rejeske, a health policy
analyst at the National Immigration Law Center, which represents immigrants,
said: gIt is unduly harsh to terminate coverage while there are still technical
problems with the federal system for verifying citizenship and immigration
status. And there has not been adequate notice to people who speak languages
other than English and Spanish.h
Florida leads the list of states
whose residents are losing coverage because of immigration and citizenship
issues, with 35,100. Federal officials said they were ending coverage for 19,600
people in Texas, 6,300 in Georgia, 5,300 in North Carolina, 5,200 in
Pennsylvania, 4,000 in Illinois and 2,400 in New Jersey. The numbers released on
Monday are for 36 states using the federal insurance marketplace. They do not
include terminations in California, New York and other states running their own
insurance exchanges.
Federal subsidies for the purchase
of private insurance are a cornerstone of the Affordable Care Act. More than
eight out of 10 people who selected health plans through the exchanges from
October through mid-April were eligible for subsidies, including income tax
credits. But in many cases, the government could not verify the incomes people
reported when they applied for subsidized insurance.
This does not mean that they
provided false information or were ineligible for assistance. The government
tried to verify incomes by checking 2012 tax return information, but consumers
may have switched jobs or received pay raises since filing those returns. As a
result, officials said, the information in their applications may not match the
data in federal files or in sources available to the government.
Mr. Slavitt said that on May 30
there were roughly 1.2 million households (and a total of 1.6 million people)
with gdata-matching issues.h
Since then, the government said,
it has closed cases for 467,000 households with data discrepancies, and 430,000
cases are gcurrently in the process of being resolved.h
gThere are still about 279,000
households with unresolved income-related data-matching issues that havenft sent
in supporting information, representing 363,000 individuals,h Mr. Slavitt said.
They will soon receive letters from the government asking for proof of income,
and if they do not reply by Sept. 30, they may lose some or all of their
subsidies.
They would still be eligible for
coverage, but in many cases could not afford it. In some cases, they would also
have to repay some or all of the subsidies they received.
It is also possible that some
people could receive larger subsidies if their incomes are lower than what they
expected when they applied.