Covered CA Canceling Coverage for 10,000 Who Have Not Verified Citizenship

Covered California will be forced to send “pre-termination” notices to more than 10,000 people who have failed to provide documentation that verifies their citizenship.

Last month Covered CA sent multiple notices to 98,900 families who had not provided proper proof of citizenship when they signed up for insurance on the state exchange. A month later, 9,645 families, representing a total of 10,474 people, did not respond to requests for documentation.

Covered CA can not provide coverage to non-citizens, so those who did not respond or were not verified will be cut off. “We are required by law to begin the process of termination,” Executive Director Peter Lee said. He added, “Even for them, we are establishing processes so they can keep their coverage if they demonstrate their legal status.”

As Breitbart News reported last month, focusing on the citizenship cases came at a cost to other users of the system. “Unfortunately, we haven’t been answering the phone as quickly as we would like,” Director Lee explained. That’s because staff used to resolve the citizenship issues were mostly taken from the call centers. According to a recent director’s report, less than 1% of callers had their calls answered within 30 seconds and about 64% simply abandoned the call when no one answered.

Last month Covered CA also apologized for failing to deliver 20,000 applications to the insurance companies in a timely manner. The LA Times reported that this caused “delays and confusion” for those involved, some of whom did not know if they had insurance or not.

Despite all of this, Peter Lee pronounced the citizenship verification effort a success, “A great deal of intensive work was done in a very short period of time, and we are pleased with the results, although we still have work to do for the individuals getting these notices.”