Minnesota extends deadline for Medicaid recipients to submit paperwork to keep coverage

ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) — Minnesota is extending its deadline for eligible Medicaid recipients to give 35,000 people more time to complete and submit their renewal paperwork to maintain their coverage.

Julie Marquardt, acting Medicaid director at the state Department of Human Services, told Minnesota Public Radio that her the extension to Aug. 1 gives her agency more time to work with community partners, managed care organizations, counties and tribes to do additional targeted outreach to prevent gaps in health care coverage.

Minnesota’s original plan to start removing ineligible people from Medicaid in July already put it among the last batch of states to resume disenrollment after the end of a pandemic prohibition on trimming Medicaid rolls. Some states already will have dropped hundreds of thousands of people from Medicaid by the time Minnesota starts doing so in August.

President Joe Biden’s administration has urged states to slow down their Medicaid eligibility determinations out of concern that too many people who may actually be eligible are getting dropped for not returning their paperwork.

“We are urging and asking states to do everything in their power to keep eligible people covered – it’s not enough to just follow the minimal federal requirements,” Daniel Tsai, director of the federal Center for Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program Services, said earlier this month.

Marquardt said Minnesota has processed over 60,000 people out of an expected 1.5 million who’ll need to renew over the course of a year. But despite the extension, she said, people shouldn’t wait to return their documentation.