With just two weeks left for state and county workers and retirees to verify that their dependents, if any, are eligible to continue to receive health insurance provided by the State Employer-Union Health Benefits Trust Fund, there are more signs that the verification process is flawed.
Elderly retirees, in particular, may face serious issues, especially if they are unable to cope with the confusing process and demand for documentation.
Take the case of my parents. My mother will be 96 in May 2010, and my dad turned 96 early this month. She is a retiree still living at home and still handling most of her own affairs, while my dad is in a nursing home suffering from Alzheimer’s.
Luckily, my mom spoke up before the verification deadline and said she was confused about the EUTF process.
A series of mailings from EUTF and plan administrators about changing health plan choices explained that they did not apply to retirees. Then came the dependent verification mailing. It was hard to sort them all out.
The verification audit sat in her mail for a while, until she finally asked: “Do I have to do anything?”
Actually, I hadn’t paid attention to whether this applied to retirees. I said I would look.
That turned out to be easier said than done.
Despite the fact that failure to complete the process by December 31 will result in loss of health insurance coverage for dependents, there isn’t a single mention of it on the EUTF web site. Search for “dependents” on the web site and you won’t find a thing.
With more extensive digging, I finally found a link where further information was supposed to be available (FYI, it was a link that I can’t recreate now). But even access to information required an employee number, which was on the mailing sent to my mother but that I didn’t have. So I couldn’t check on it for her.
Luckily, my sister, Bonnie, was able to intervene and move the process along.
According to the instructions, my mother has choices.
She can submit her 2008 joint tax return filed as husband/wife. Except that she can’t find where she put last year’s taxes.
She has the choice of submitting a copy of her marriage license and a real property tax bill showing joint ownership. Seriously. Do you know where your marriage license is? And can your mother find her last tax bill?
I doubt that my mother would have completed the the verification audit without substantial assistance. What about others who don’t have family nearby to intervene? What about those who don’t ask for help because they don’t understand what is at stake or find the whole process too confusing?
I think a lot of retirees are going to have these problems. Things get lost in the clutter. Required documentation may be hard to find or nonexistent. Deadlines are difficult to keep in mind. I would guess that a significant number of elders may just give up and hope for the best. Others may be legally eligible but incapable of responding. There appear to be no follow-up procedures before unverified dependents are retroactively cut off from their health insurance coverage.
Prediction: There are going to be many painful stories in a couple of months when retirees find their loved ones denied medical care because EUTF has dropped dependents from the eligible list. The lawsuits probably come later when the bills accumulate. More bad press is not what EUTF needs.