A Hurtful Hand
Since last January,
From the attempt by the federal government last summer to repeal the Affordable Care Act's expansion of Medicaid in the state, which has granted health insurance to an additional 200,000-plus New Mexicans since 2014, to a farm bill currently moving through
State programs have also tightened. Last December, the
And the number of people enrolled in both Medicaid and the
One reason there are less people receiving assistance from the state, HSD spokeswoman
"As the economy improves, the need for public assistance, like Medicaid, declines," Robertson writes in an email.
However, the department can't provide causal proof to support the claim. When asked for a jobs report showing how benefits and employment were linked, Robertson emailed SFR employment data from the
A more likely explanation is that HSD is coming out from under a court order that forbade automatically denying applicants for SNAP and Medicaid benefits.
In an April hearing, a federal judge said that HSD should start automating rejections of Medicaid and SNAP applications once again on
In another public relations blow, HSD employees in 2016 admitted to faking information on emergency SNAP applications so the department would have more time to process them. HSD has operated under the oversight of a special master since November of that year to ensure it complies with federal law.
"The caseload declining is directly related to the court lessening their oversight over HSD, and them starting to close more cases for reasons they blame on applicants," says Sovereign Hager, an attorney with the New Mexico Center on Law and Poverty who is litigating a decades-old class action lawsuit over HSD's processing of benefits applications.
Meanwhile, a farm bill wending through
If passed into law, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates the bill would reduce federal spending on SNAP by
As of February, 222,265 New Mexicans are receiving SNAP benefits, and the lobbying group New Mexico Voices for Children says 74 percent of SNAP participants live with their families.
In all states, the federal government pays for the benefits ^Ф'/ that SNAP enrollees receive, while HSD splits administrative costs of the program with the feds.
Gov.
"It would be one thing if the economy was booming and there were job opportunities," says
Cuts to Medicaid, meanwhile, are certainly on the way for some of the 855,000 New Mexicans insured through the aid program, though they won't appear with the severity that advocates once feared-at least, for now.
Congressional
The idea died as
HSD has proposed changes to the state's Medicaid program that would fetaure additional costs for low-income patients. These include new monthly premiums for certain adults and copays for certain services, as well as a phasing-out of three-month retroactive coverage for new enrollees by 2020. The changes are supposed to make up for a
Abuko Estrada, an attorney for the New Mexico Center on Law and Poverty, says HSD submitted these proposed changes as part of a waiver for approval to the federal government. If the waiver is approved, he says, the state will then "negotiate with the federal government the terms and conditions that will apply to the waiver, [and] how the waiver will be implemented."
After that, the second iteration of the state's Medicaid program, known as Centennial Care 2.0, would go into effect
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