Need help with Medicaid or kids’ insurance in Missouri? You’ll wait on hold | Opinion

Kansas City Star (MO)

Here’s a sure sign of bad customer service: Long hold times.

We’ve all been there. You call up a hotline for a company or government agency to resolve an important problem, only nobody can take your call right away. So you sit and wait — through awful music and occasional assurances that “your call is very important to us,” hoping and waiting for an actual human to come on the line.

Is there anything more frustrating?

Maybe not in Missouri, and certainly not for Medicaid applicants. The state just might just be the reigning grand champion of terrible service for its most vulnerable residents.

Earlier this month, the federal government issued warnings to 16 states — including Missouri and Kansas — for exceptionally long wait times at the call centers that help residents complete applications and renewals for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Missouri reportedly had the very worst wait times of any state — an average of 48 minutes per call in the month of May. That’s so long that 44% of callers simply gave up rather than see the call through to its completion.

Missouri officials say revised and resubmitted data from the state’s call centers show an average wait time of a mere 28 minutes per call in May. That’s still slightly higher than the 25 minutes-per-call average in the states that received warnings. Since then, officials say they’ve managed to get wait times under 20 minutes — but even that is stratospherically higher than the three-minute average wait time in states that received no warning at all from the feds.

“We’ve still got work to do,” acknowledged Robert Knodell, director of the Missouri Department of Social Services.

The warning to Missouri and Kansas comes as state-run Medicaid plans are in a post-pandemic paring down of their patient rolls. Beneficiaries usually renew their applications for aid every year. After COVID-19 forced the country into lockdown, however, the government suspended that requirement throughout the pandemic emergency. That grace period ended this spring.

The problem is that a lot of folks — including many who probably are eligible for continued Medicaid assistance — aren’t renewing their paperwork, often for reasons that may not be in their control. An estimated 45,000 Kansans, two-thirds of them children, have recently had their benefits terminated for “procedural reasons.” In Missouri, roughly 32,000 people were kicked off Medicaid in June, half of them kids.

State call centers are supposed to be a critical link for the people trying to keep those benefits. But that’s not how it is working out in Kansas and Missouri.

Missouri deserves special scrutiny, though.

It was just last month, after all, that the state acknowledged it won’t participate in another federal program — one that would have provided summer meals to Missouri’s hungry kids who had participated in the free or reduced lunch programs at their schools during the 2022-23 school year. Forty states participated in the program this year. Missouri did not. Officials said they simply didn’t have the infrastructure in place to make the plan work this summer.

Put together, the Medicaid and summer meal stumbles make it reasonable to wonder whether the GOP-led government in Jefferson City is able to do the basic work of providing services to the less well-off members of the public — or whether those efforts are simply not a priority.

“It’s no secret our systems have been under-invested in for a long time,” Knodell said.

He said his agency is pushing to improve its responses to Medicaid inquiries with a new “blitz” system that redirects resources to help the call centers. And he said Missourians could bypass the call centers by going online to mydss.mo.gov/renew (Kansans can go to kancare.ks.gov to help move their renewals along.)

That’s a start. But it is time for both Kansas and Missouri to do better. When it comes to Medicaid, long hold times aren’t just frustrating or a matter of inadequate customer service — they’re a threat to the health and well-being of our neighbors.