Medicaid benefits to stop for 3,100

By Adam Wilson | The Olympian • Published June 27, 2008

The state expects to end health care benefits for 3,100 people next month because they cannot produce birth certificates to prove they are U.S. citizens.

Washington Medicaid program leader Doug Porter, who has railed against the citizenship check since it took effect in 2006, said the people are citizens. The check was approved a year earlier by Congress and backed by the Bush administration.

After hiring 27 people to perform the checks and combing through the records of 1 million residents on Medicaid, the state found one noncitizen receiving benefits: a 64-year-old Canadian woman.

Medicaid is a federal medical benefit for low-income residents.

Porter on Thursday told the Caseload Forecast Council — a group of lawmakers and officials who predict demand for state services — that he expects Medicaid enrollment to decrease.

That's because the state was cited in a January audit that said it could not provide services to people while it waited for their proof of citizenship. Beginning Tuesday, the state must have proof before any health insurance benefits are allowed.

The state has been providing benefits to 16,300 people who have yet to show proof of citizenship, according to the state Health and Recovery Services Administration. Some already qualify for citizen-only programs and need to have their computer files updated, and others are waiting for verification from another state, the agency reported.

But about 3,100 — about 1 percent of the adults on Medicaid — likely never will get proof of citizenship, Porter said. Typically, those people were born in another state that requires people to show a driver's license to get a copy of their birth certificate, he said. Because they lack a license or the resources to meet other legal requirements, they never get the certificate.

The state cannot require people to pay the costs of showing they qualify for low-income programs such as Medicaid, said Manning Pellanda of the Health and Recovery Services Administration.

As a result, the state has spent $325,000 on providing birth certificates for those people, he said.

Sen. Eric Oemig, a Kirkland Democrat who is on the forecast council, said the state can't risk flouting the federal demands for proof of citizenship because it will lose federal funding, which accounts for about half of the Medicaid budget.

But Porter told lawmakers the costs of those who are turned away wouldn't disappear.

"What we will create is a liability in our state, thousands of people who are not insured, who would have been on our Medicaid system in the past," he said. "They will shift the burden to hospitals and others."