The Sununu administration spent — some would say squandered — $187,000 attempting to bring an estimated 17,000 participants in the state’s expanded Medicaid program into compliance with a new work requirement that has since been blocked by a federal judge, the Concord Monitorreports.
That included almost $109,000 paid to a contractor to call Medicaid recipients; about $42,000 devoted to a door-to-door effort in some inner-city neighborhoods; more than $23,000 spent sending out letters to all Medicaid participants; $12,000 for informational materials; and $1,000 for overtime.
This aggressive effort reached a total of about 800 (!) people who got assistance in complying with the new requirement. That left about 16,200 recipients in danger of losing their health insurance by failing to document their compliance.
The state should be thanking its lucky stars that this outreach program ceased with the judge’s ruling, and it should be hoping hard that its appeal of that ruling fails. By our calculation it cost almost $234 to assist each of those 800 participants; at that rate, it would have cost nearly $3.8 million to help the rest. That money could be and should be spent, as intended, on providing health insurance coverage for the working poor.
It was predictable that many Medicaid participants would be confused about or unaware of the new work requirement when it was rolled out. But state officials, with a fine sense of New Hampshire exceptionalism, were sanguine. They argued that the Granite State’s program, enacted in 2018, would not repeat the experience of Arkansas, where more than 17,000 people lost insurance coverage before its work requirement was invalidated by court order, because the outreach effort there had been poor.
But in June, the first month that documentation of 100 hours of work or “community engagement” was required, only about 8,000 of the 25,000 New Hampshire recipients subject to the new rule were in compliance. Dismayed state officials then put off implementation until September. In July, U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg, sitting in Washington, came to their rescue and blocked the work requirement. He ruled that the Trump administration, which provided the waiver necessary for the state to enact it, had failed to address the potential for low-income residents to lose health insurance coverage.
It is puzzling that state officials did not anticipate the difficulties in communicating to a low-income population the complexities of the new work requirement, with its exemptions for those with disabilities, with geographical hardships, with children under the age of 6 and so on.
In the age of endless phone scams and junk mail, who could blame participants for not heeding messages purporting to be from the state of New Hampshire? And who these days is eager to answer a knock on the door from strangers? Not to mention that these home visits took place between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m., when most people are, well, working.
New Hampshire Public Radio reported this summer that evidence suggests that of the 17,000 people who lost their health insurance in Arkansas, more than 95 percent would have met the requirements. We doubt that the percentage in New Hampshire is lower. The state should pull the plug on this fool’s errand and let people get back to work.