DENVER POST / AP: The number of eligible people who were purged from Pennsylvania’s Medicaid rolls amid Gov. Tom Corbett’s administration crackdown aimed at welfare waste is possibly many thousands higher than state officials told lawmakers earlier this week, Philadelphia-based lawyers for the poor told The Associated Press on Thursday.
Citing figures from the Department of Public Welfare, Community Legal Services of Philadelphia said that nearly half the people, or 7,331, who responded to a letter sent by the agency in the fall have since re-enrolled in Medicaid. Just 16,000 people actually responded to the approximately 100,000 letters sent by the department, raising the possibility that many thousands more wrongly lost Medicaid or even re-enrolled on their own without responding to the letter, Community Legal Services lawyer Richard Weishaupt said…
On Tuesday, the department’s acting secretary, Bev Mackereth, told the Senate Appropriations Committee that 3 percent out of about 100,000 who had been sent letters were actually eligible for Medicaid. A department spokeswoman said Thursday that it stands behind Mackereth’s statement, but has been unable to explain how the agency had determined that the other 97,000 were not eligible… (more)
EDITOR: How can Mackereth say such a nasty thing about ‘Fast Eddy’ who loved to have his picture taken handing over poster size facsimilies of State checks for multi-million dollars.
This article was so off base that you had to go to the Denver Post to get it? No PA newspapers would publish it? Yeesh. It’s not up to the state to prove you don’t quality. It’s up to the recipient to prove they do qualify. Again and again if necessary. Like a tax deduction, I can’t imagine someone who qualifies for benefits not applying for them.
EDITOR: As noted, it was an AP wire story. We picked it up through Google shortly after it was released and before it was published by other media presumably including many in Pennsylvania.