Glitch will delay Medicaid for New Jersey’s poor – NorthJersey.com

State officials said Thursday that thousands of poor people who applied for health coverage using the federal government’s website are unable to be enrolled because of serious glitches in the system.

New Jersey Medicaid said in­formation it received from the federal insurance marketplace for about 25,000 residents who qualify for free health coverage from New Jersey’s program for the poor is “unusable.”

Their applications can’t be pro­cessed, and they can’t yet be enrolled for coverage that is supposed to begin on Jan. 1, said Nicole Brossoie, assistant commissioner of the state Department of Human Services, which runs Medicaid.

It is yet another problem in the disastrous rollout of the federal marketplace for people who want to sign up for health insurance. After assurances that the federal website would automatically send enrollment information to the state for those who qualify for Medicaid, New Jersey officials discovered this week that the state and the federal computer systems don’t communicate smoothly.

Worse, people who think they enrolled successfully in Medicaid have no idea that, in fact, their applications are in limbo.

State Medicaid “is working with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to receive a usable file as soon as possible,” Brossoie said late Thursday afternoon. She did not offer any timetable for when the problem might be resolved.

Governor Christie, who opposes President Obama’s health care overhaul, assented earlier this year to the expansion of NJ FamilyCare, as Medicaid is known in the state. It is expected to enroll an estimated 300,000 additional people over the next few years. Most are childless adults too poor to be able to buy the new plans offered on the federal insurance marketplace, even with subsidies.

The entire cost of the expansion during its first three years is to be paid by the federal government. Christie did not want to leave that money on the table but will reverse his decision if the program becomes a burden on taxpayers, he said.

Computer problems on healthcare.gov, the website that serves as the portal to both individual health plans and Medicaid, left many of the enrollees who used the site confused about whether they had actually signed up for Medicaid or not.

When they reached the point in the application process where a Web page informed them they qualified for NJ FamilyCare, users said, there was no enrollment button or any information about what was supposed to happen next.