“We’ve Never Seen Anything Like This”
May 4th, 2007 at 7:39 pm
Just as news of the unprecedented drop in CHIP enrollment came out yesterday, several women who know more than a thing or two about the process were holding a press conference.
During the call, Anne Dunkelberg, associate director of CPPP, and Barbara Best, executive director of Children’s Defense Fund Texas, joined Tamika Scott to highlight the story of her late son, Devante Johnson. Devante’s well-chronicled story is a too-common tale of a very sick child falling between the cracks of Medicaid and CHIP. The 13-year-old was undergoing treatments for advanced liver cancer when Scott had to switch from Medicaid to CHIP. Delays and errors processing her application cost Devante four months of insurance. His normal treatments were stopped, and his condition rapidly deteriorated. While the chances of Devante surviving no matter the treatment were very slim, the bureaucratic muck-up cost him greatly in his quality of life in his last few months. Devante died in March.
There is plenty more anecdotal evidence of families suffering through similar indignities. Many of them are catalogued in CDF’s report “In Harm’s Way.” Don’t read it if you’re feeling down already. The reason for drops is hard to pin down, but Dunkelberg and Best, whose work involves helping families enroll (and re-enroll, no easy task), said things are getting even worse since the Accenture contract was canceled. “We’ve never seen anything like this,” Best said.
She traces it all back to December 2005: “There’s before Accenture and there’s after Accenture. And there’s no comparison between the two.” As for why there would be a ripple affect from Accenture’s failures, it has a lot to do with the way the Health and Human Services Commission, led by the embattled Albert Hawkins, rolled out the program. As reported in the pages of the Observer:
Despite the warnings (about Accenture’s failures), HHSC left itself without a backup plan. In late 2006, the agency notified nearly 3,000 state enrollment and eligibility workers that they would soon lose their jobs. Predictably, this led to an exodus. More than 800 veteran enrollment workers took jobs elsewhere in state government, and hundreds more simply walked out. The loss of institutional memory proved disastrous when the call-center plan failed, and HHSC found it needed the state workers, some of whom had done enrollment for decades.
Lightening the work load on enrollment workers is one of main motivations behind changing enrollment periods from six to 12 months. To that end, all three women repeatedly voiced support for HB 109, which overwhelming passed the House but has stalled in the Senate.
