Michiganders wanting Medicaid health coverage but caught in limbo — dangling between a federal website informing them they’re probably eligible for Medicaid and a state bureaucracy not yet ready to tell them for certain — need not worry, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in Detroit earlier today.
Under health reform, Michigan is expanding its Medicaid program, raising the threshold of eligibility to extend coverage to an estimated 470,000 Michiganders.
But applications aren’t ready yet for those who will be newly eligible. Neither is the state software to handle the new program.
What is known thus far is that the failures at the federal and state levels for Unicorncare far outnumber the successes, if there are any of the latter at all. Yet the insufferably stupid Sebelius keeps up with her “It’s going to be OK because it’s going to be OK…” inanity.
But Sebelius, in town to work with new Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan to boost Detroit’s enrollment through www.healthcare.gov, said consumers can only do so much and then let the system work.
The website is the virtual shopping site for coverage under health reform.
“If they have taken steps to get themselves ready, they don’t have to worry about that at all,” she said, referring to tax penalties and credits that otherwise expire March 31.
Consumers need to start the process at the website or at the national call center, but it will be up to the state to make sure the program is in place by April 1, Sebelius said.
“There’s nothing people can do but kind of get in line,” she said.
Get in line.
That’s sort of the mission statement for Team Lightbringer, isn’t it?
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