Missouri’s Medicaid Program Striking Out Intended Beneficiaries

In baseball, getting a hit three out of 10 at-bats could make you an All-Star, and maybe even a Hall of Famer if you do it consistently enough. But while batting .300 is pretty good for the National Pastime, in most other contexts succeeding only three out of 10 times won’t get you accolades.

That point was hit out of the ballpark over the past few days.

Last week mid-Missouri’s ABC 17 reported on the story of a pregnant woman who had been trying to sign up for Medicaid benefits, only to have her paperwork lost and her calls unreturned by the Department of Social Services (DSS). When the issue came up at a House hearing, the DSS admitted it had to do better, but it also admitted something astonishing (emphasis mine).

The Department says thirty percent of its callers are having their needs met, which Campbell acknowledges is too low. She says staff are being reassigned to taking calls and other changes are being made to improve that percentage, but [State Rep. Sue] Allen says the situation remains frustrating.

“In a company, in a private business, people would be gone,” observes Allen.

Missouri’s Medicaid program is deeply broken, and yet some of our politicians think now is the time to expand it with Obamacare. It isn’t. In baseball and business, step one would be to fix what is wrong and then build upon successes, not to double-down on a bad system and bad players. That’s what Missouri should be doing: fixing Medicaid, not making an already bad situation worse—especially for the patients the program was supposed to help.

Missouri’s Medicaid system is institutionally well below the Mendoza line. It’s time to rethink the program.