TennCare’s ACA snub is shameful
The doorway to TennCare is like “the eye of a needle,” according to legal and health care experts.
The analogy comes from Sam Brooke, a Southern Poverty Law Center attorney handling a lawsuit filed last week against Tennessee for its “disgraceful” and “atrocious” long delays in the TennCare application process.
Eleven plaintiffs are named in the federal class-action lawsuit — all with applications pending for more than 140 days and some for as long as six months. The plaintiffs include a Soddy-Daisy mother who applied for TennCare in January during her pregnancy. She was initially approved but now she and her 3-month-old baby remain without coverage, delaying doctors appointments and vaccinations. She’s called more than 30 times with no resolutions, just pledges from state workers that her call would be “escalated.” Then finally, just over a week ago, she was told her application was not in the state’s system at all.
The suit claims the state has broken federal law and “broken a decades-old promise to its most vulnerable residents,” newborns, pregnant women and the elderly. The suit is the first of its kind filed against a state for how the state has handled its Medicaid enrollment since the Affordable Care Act went into effect.
Attorneys say Tennessee “is among the worst, if not the worst, offenders” in its failure to connect eligible applicants with coverage, and the state is a “national outlier” in how it sends applicants to apply for TennCare programs solely through Healthcare. gov — which was never designed or intended to screen for such a wide array of Medicaid programs.