How Many Obamacare Enrollees in Your State Have Citizenship Issues?
Marguerite Bowling /
In another effort to clear up enrollment inconsistencies in Obamacare, the federal government announced that 310,000 enrollees will receive notices about questionable citizenship or immigration data.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which is in charge of Obamacare’s federal health insurance marketplace, says notices require consumers to send in documents supporting their citizenship status by Sept. 5 or face losing their Obamacare health plan Sept. 30.
Florida had the highest number of notices—which are in English and Spanish—among states in which the federal government runs HealthCare.gov, Obamacare’s online health insurance exchange.
Some 93,800 Floridians were sent final notices, eclipsing the 52,700 Obamacare enrollees in Texas who got them.
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Obamacare navigator Nilda Acosta helps Richard Delph sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act at the Dover Shores Community Center in Orlando. (Photo: Polaris/Newscom)
In its announcement, CMS, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services, said:
We have worked hard to reach each consumer with a data matching issue multiple times. Specifically, the [federal Obamacare] marketplace has asked consumers five to seven times—via mail, phone and email—to submit their information.
The 14 states that opened their own insurance exchanges under the Affordable Care Act also are correcting inaccurate citizenship and immigration status, as is the District of Columbia, CMS said.
Edmund Haislmaier, a senior research fellow in health policy at The Heritage Foundation, predicted the problem of citizenship status will be bigger than it appears once the state-run exchanges are factored in. Haislmaier said:
It’s an incomplete picture right now because states with poorly working exchange systems like Oregon, Hawaii, Nevada, and Maryland could have far more citizenship status problems.
Even states with exchange systems that worked well—such as California and New York—could have a substantial issue with citizenship because of their large immigrant populations.
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