MISSOULA, Mont. — An hour before sunrise, Shelly Brost walked a mile in freezing rain to the public assistance office. She was running out of time to prove she still qualified for food aid after being stymied by a backlogged state call center.
Twice, she’d tried to use Montana’s public assistance help line to complete an interview required to recertify her SNAP benefits. Each time, the call dropped after more than an hour on hold.
“I was ready to cry,” Brost said as she stood in line with about a dozen other people waiting for the office to open on a recent November morning. “I’ve got a hungry 13-year-old kid.”
Low-income families that need safety-net services, such as food and cash assistance, have become collateral damage in the bureaucratic scramble to determine whether tens of millions of people still qualify for Medicaid after a pandemic-era freeze on disenrollment ended this spring. These are people whose applications and renewal forms have been delayed or lost, or who, like Brost, can’t reach overwhelmed government call center workers.
The Medicaid unwinding has created huge problems for administrative staff,” said Leighton Ku, director of the Center for Health Policy Research at George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health.
Most states rely on the same workers and computer systems to sort eligibility for Medicaid and SNAP, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C. The difficulty of signing up for other public assistance benefits varies, depending on how each state sets up its programs and how well agencies are staffed to handle extra work caused by Medicaid redeterminations.
People seeking public aid have historically encountered long call center wait times and limited options for in-person help. Those long-standing problems have worsened as record numbers of Medicaid recipients seek help with enrollment.
Attorneys and organizations assisting applicants for food benefits in Montana, Missouri, and Virginia, for example, said applications have vanished without a response and phone calls to workers determining eligibility frequently go unanswered.
“Our clients are already living on a razor’s edge, and this can just knock them off,” said Megan Dishong, deputy director of the Montana Legal Services Association. DeAnna Marchand of Missoula, Montana, is among those struggling to reach state public assistance offices as time runs out to prove she still qualifies for food assistance Read More
