Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families is using a private foundation's $300,000 grant to fund the salaries of four outreach workers helping people enroll in insurance coverage made available under the federal health care law, the director of the advocacy group said Tuesday.
Representatives of the advocacy group said it will also use money from the grant from the Fred Darragh Foundation to pay for mailings, social-media communications and other outreach activities; facilitate communication among various groups helping with enrollment; and advocate for a smooth enrollment process.
The campaign will be guided by Arkansans for Coverage, a newly formed coalition of health care and advocacy groups.
"We really did not want to get into the outreach and enrollment business, but we just felt it was so important," Rich Huddleston, director of Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, said at a news conference Tuesday.
The coalition is attempting to fill a gap left after the Legislature, during this year's fiscal session, banned the state departments of Insurance, Human Services and Health from conducting outreach or promoting enrollment, starting July 1 of this year.
Under federally funded contracts that ended on June 30, the Arkansas Insurance Department had paid for more than 500 outreach workers employed by more than two dozen groups, including state agencies, nonprofits and private companies.
The outreach workers are licensed by the Insurance Department to provide one-on-one help with enrollment.
Seth Blomeley, an Insurance Department spokesman, said some of the organizations have continued to employ outreach workers, using their own funds, but he didn't know how many workers remain active.
Huddleston said the new campaign is "just a drop in the bucket in terms of the outreach and enrollment that needs to be done, but with Arkansas leaving tens of millions of dollars on the table for outreach and enrollment, efforts like this have to step in with whatever private funding we can find."
The ban was included in the appropriation bills for the Insurance, Human Services and Health departments as part of a compromise to win support for continuing to allocate federal funds for the state's Medicaid expansion.
The expansion extended eligibility for Medicaid to about 250,000 Arkansans -- adults with incomes of up to 138 percent of the poverty level.
That income cutoff is $16,105 for an individual or $32,913 for a family of four.
Under the so-called private option, most Arkansans who qualify receive the coverage through plans purchased on the state's health insurance exchange. The Medicaid program pays the premium and provides additional subsidies to reduce or eliminate the enrollee's out-of-pocket spending for medical care
The 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act makes federal tax credits available to many people who don't qualify for Medicaid and have incomes of less than 400 percent of the poverty level: for example, $45,960 for an individual or $94,200 for a family of four.
Ernie Dumas, president of the Fred Darragh Foundation, said its board asked Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families to take up the campaign after the legislation barring the state agencies from conducting outreach was passed.
The foundation is named for the Little Rock businessman who founded the Arkansas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and died in 2003.
"The foundation board discussed it, and we decided, well, maybe we could step into the breach in a small way, and so that's what we did," Dumas said.
Sarah Pearce, health care policy fellow at Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, said the grant helped continue funding after June 30 for one outreach worker each at Future Builders, a Wrightsville-based nonprofit; the Tri-County Rural Health Network in southeast Arkansas; and the Mental Health Council of Arkansas.
Money from the grant also allowed the Jonesboro-based Legal Aid of Arkansas to hire an additional outreach worker, Pearce said.
Members of the coalition include the Arkansas Hospital Association, the Arkansas Interfaith Alliance, the Arkansas Minority Health Commission, the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville's Partners for Inclusive Communities, and Community Health Centers of Arkansas.
"People can't gain the economic security and the preventative health services that the affordable health coverage provides if they don't know about it," Pearce said. "There are people out there who haven't sought out the coverage available through the marketplace because they're unaware of it or they're unaware of the financial assistance or the availability of in-person help."
Among those who have benefited from an outreach worker's help is Michael Fite, 53, of White Hall.
At the news conference, he said he sought help from a Future Builders worker after his wife, Susan, lost her Medicaid coverage, effective Aug. 1, after she became eligible for Social Security benefits because of her disability, and her income increased from $181 a month to $554 a month.
Fite said his wife remained eligible for Medicaid, however, and the worker helped restore her coverage.
"I was lost, totally confused, totally out of anything that I've experienced before," Fite said. "It just touched my heart so good to find a place that people actually cared."
People who qualify for the private option or traditional Medicaid can apply at any time. Others are mostly limited to enrolling during specified periods.
The enrollment period for coverage starting in 2015 will be Nov. 15-Feb. 15. People who don't qualify for Medicaid can also enroll in exchange plans after certain life events, such as the loss of a job.
While the pace of enrollment in the expanded Medicaid program has exceeded expectations, with more than 200,000 people approved for coverage as of Aug. 31, sign-ups among those who don't qualify for Medicaid have lagged.
As of Sept. 1, 38,787 people who did not qualify for Medicaid were enrolled in exchange plans, Blomeley said.
By comparison, the Menlo Park, Calif.,-based Kaiser Family Foundation estimated in November that 150,000 Arkansans are eligible for coverage subsidized by tax credits.
Other Arkansas groups also are helping people enroll. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced Monday that it has awarded more than $930,000 to Partners for Inclusive Communities, which researches concerns faced by disabled people, and $183,286 to Enroll the Ridge, a Jonesboro nonprofit, to support outreach workers known as navigators.
The state's community health centers have about 50 workers covering 38 counties, Mary Leath, chief executive of the Community Health Centers of Arkansas.
Matthew Glass, chief executive of West Memphis-based Fidelity Insurance Group, who spoke at the news conference, said his company has signed up at least 750 people, primarily those who qualified for the private option.
For each one, his company receives a commission of $12 a month from the insurance company during the first year of coverage, and $6 a month after that, as long as the enrollee keeps the policy.
"We saw this as a huge economic opportunity," he said.
Many agents became frustrated during the first months of open enrollment last year by the flaws that plagued the federal enrollment portal healthcare.gov , he said.
The state enrollment sites for the private option, access.arkansas.gov and insureark.org, performed better, he said, adding that the federal site works much better now than it did last fall.
"Friday, I enrolled someone in probably seven minutes," he said. "It could not have been easier."
A Section on 09/10/2014