Around 9 million people lose Medicaid each year because of paperwork mistakes. Is that preventable?

Medicaid is a federal program that provides free or cheap health insurance for more than 70 million Americans who are either low-income or have disabilities. The program is massive and costs hundreds of billions of dollars each year.

According to one finding, around 20% of people who receive Medicaid lose their coverage during the renewal process. This means that every year, more than 9 million people who were previously eligible lose their benefits because they don’t fill out the right paperwork.

How to address this issue of bureaucracy and red tape is a question that researchers like Laura Dague have been wrestling with.

She’s a professor of health policy at the Bush School at Texas A&M University and coauthor of a new working paper on this subject. She joined the Standard to discuss their findings.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. 

Texas Standard: You and a team of researchers designed an experiment to try and address this issue in which people lose coverage due to red tape. Could you explain how it worked?

Laura Dague: Our study was set up to look at whether sending folks outreach offering free help from trained health insurance navigators could work to help eligible people enrolled in their coverage when they tried to renew.

And so we worked with a trusted community health insurance navigator group in Wisconsin called Covering Wisconsin and sent pre-recorded phone calls to more than 55,000 households offering help from our navigators to help renew their Medicaid.