BOSTON — For more than 2.4 million Massachusetts residents, the federally mandated redetermination process, the review of income and other eligibility requirements to qualify for state-subsidized health insurance, started with the receipt of a blue envelope sometime since April.
Inside are key questions that determine whether they are eligible to receive state-subsidized health insurance coverage, also known as Medicaid. There’s also phone numbers of organizations and links to them, that can help residents complete the paperwork.
The review process, which had been on pause for more than three years during the COVID-19 pandemic, has so far revealed that more than 76,000 of the residents who had been carried on the rolls no longer qualified for the subsidy. And the review process is only halfway completed, scheduled to end in April.
State officials anticipated some residents would lose coverage
“We knew, and anticipated, that people would lose coverage,” said Amy Rosenthal, executive director of Health Care For All, a local consumer health advocacy organization that aims to ensure coverage for all residents.
To guarantee as many state residents have health insurance coverage as possible, three organizations –MassHealth, the Health Connector and Health Care For All – are collaborating on a statewide campaign to facilitate the process, alongside 30 community and faith organizations.
The groups have sent field workers knocking on more than 421,000 doors in 15 municipalities with the highest volume of MassHealth members. They have staffed nearly 1,400 outreach events and activities. They speak nine different languages including Haitian and Cape Verdean creole, Arabic, Chinese, Vietnamese, Spanish and Portuguese.
“The canvassers live in the neighborhoods where they are working, speak the languages of the neighborhood,” Rosenthal said, because in the end, the goal is to insure as many people as possible, to attain universal coverage in the state.
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