Nearly 130,000 New Jersey residents have so far been terminated from NJ FamilyCare, the state’s health insurance program, as they continue the process of determining which members are still eligible to receive health insurance following a years-long pause due to the pandemic.
Of the 128,263 members who lost coverage, 99,397 have lost their health insurance due to procedural reasons such as not completing the required paperwork, according to figures provided by the New Jersey Department of Human Services. The rest were deemed ineligible, mostly for financial reasons.
Approximately 243,000 people, or 29% of the 837,450 members re-assessed, had their coverage renewed.
According to DHS estimates, nearly 280,000 of the nearly 2.29 million members in total, are expected to lose coverage due to ineligibility over the next 10 months.
The federal government in March 2020 temporarily waived Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) requirements to help prevent people from losing health coverage during the pandemic.
State-run Medicaid programs were required by federal law to restart eligibility reviews by April 1 under the federal FY 2023 Omnibus spending bill passed by Congress and signed by President Biden in late December.
Somehow, although people send in the paperwork, they claim they’ve never received it. It’s a huge problem because there is no way to prove otherwise.