Arkansas lawmakers OK plan to tap more money for prisons

Gov. Asa Hutchinson announced Tuesday the Dept. of Human Services eliminated the backlog of Medicaid income reverifications and will resume reverifying income and sending termination notices.

Hutchinson announced the suspension earlier this month so the state could address a backlog of replies sent in by Medicaid recipients.

Hutchinson has ordered the Department of Human Services to end the contract despite such warnings.

Hutchinson said 300 DHS staffers have worked more than 2,200 hours of overtime since last week to work on the responses.

The state by the end of September will have finished redetermining eligibility for about 600,000 Medicaid and private option cases where recipients have been on the program for at least a year without an income verification.

“I’m authorizing them to proceed today with reinstituting the verification process”.

However, two of the three private insurance companies covering private option beneficiaries, Blue Cross and Ambetter, have reached an agreement with DHS to continue to cover prescription costs in terminated cases for 30 days.

“We’ve definitely seen improvement”, DHS spokeswoman Amy Webb said. DHS Director John Selig said the verification process has been expedited for high-need individuals. Hutchinson so far has rejected calls to extend the deadline to respond, even though the federal government allows states to give recipients up to 30 days.

“If you put a 30-day window in place, and somebody is ineligible, and then it goes to 90 days beyond that for the appeal process, ultimately when you’re talking about tens of thousands of people, you’re talking about millions and millions of dollars”, he said. “We know that mail is getting processed”.

Bennett also said the cost to hire 35 new DHS employees, together with the $50,000 already spent on overtime, likely adds up to about $1 million.