Activists continue to call for changes to Arkansas Medicaid, allege unfair losses of coverage

Organizers with Arkansas Community Organizations hold up signs advocating for better Medicaid coverage outside Jefferson County’s Department of Human Services office in Pine Bluff on Tuesday. (Photo by Tess Vrbin/Arkansas Advocate)

Arkansas Medicaid recipients and advocates repeated their ongoing messages that the state Department of Human Services should provide broader Medicaid coverage and process applications more efficiently at a Tuesday demonstration outside DHS’ Jefferson County office.

Arkansas Community Organizations, the group behind the protest, has continually emphasized the benefits of the federally-funded health insurance program and the struggles low-income Arkansans face when they cannot afford health care or get on Medicaid quickly. On Tuesday, the group added a new message: that DHS employees are overworked and under-supported.

“When you walk into DHS, prepare to take a number and sit for a long time,” Medicaid recipient William Gerard said. “There might be two workers at four windows and not enough [support] to serve their caseload.”

Cathy Young of Pine Bluff and Be’Atte Martin of Little Rock both said they did not receive notification from DHS when the agency changed their Medicaid coverage plans.

Notifications might not reach people in the mail through no fault of their own, and sometimes DHS implements multiple changes before a Medicaid client gets notice of the first one, said Brainard Bivens, who worked at the Jefferson County DHS office from 1995 to 2017.

“They have to make a determination [of eligibility] within a certain amount of time, and a lot of time they cannot make determinations because of — what’s the chronic thing? ‘Not enough information. We didn’t get the information,’” Bivens said.

DHS spent six months in 2023 reviewing the eligibility of Medicaid recipients whose coverage was extended for three years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, even if they no longer qualified for benefits because of income or other eligibility limits.

More than 184,500 of the roughly 420,000 Arkansans who retained coverage during the extension were disenrolled between April 1 and Sept. 30 because they did not provide necessary eligibility information, according to DHS data.

Arkansas Community Organizations held several protests last year, asserting DHS did not do enough to ensure people were ineligible before cutting their Medicaid coverage. Most states had a full year to conduct the “unwinding” of the coverage extension, but Arkansas had six months, as required by a 2021 state law. State officials have defended the unwinding process.

The most recent protest before Tuesday was in May outside DHS headquarters in Little Rock, in response to a Georgetown University report released earlier that month. Arkansas had the tenth-largest decrease in the number of children enrolled in Medicaid at the end of 2023 than before the pandemic began in 2020, the report stated.

Martin said Tuesday that she lost coverage in August 2023 despite still being eligible, and she then lost both Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) food benefits and her caregiver for her health issues.

She regained coverage for Medicaid but not for SNAP, she said, and DHS did not receive 76 documents she submitted proving her eligibility for benefits.

Martin received SNAP and Medicaid in Oklahoma within a week of moving there earlier this year, but she was unable to find housing, she said, so she left in August in order for her children to go back to school in Little Rock, and the family remains homeless.

“Now that I’m back in Arkansas, I’m being forced to go through all the hoops with DHS again to receive the benefits that I’m entitled to,” Martin said.

Arkansas Community Organizations is planning two more demonstrations in October, organizers Neil Sealy and Al Allen said.

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