Diedre Wortham was at school when she found out her son no longer had Medicaid coverage.
The 48-year-old single mother was finishing work on her high school diploma through a program offered at the , an affiliate of Goodwill Industries. Wortham grew up in the Cochran Towers housing projects north of downtown. The last tower in that infamous public housing project came down in 2012.
It was a tough place to grow up. She started her high school years at Cleveland Naval ROTC Academy, transferred to Roosevelt, and fell one semester short of graduating high school three decades ago. Life got in the way. Now she鈥檚 trying to better herself and show her kids how important education is.
Next year, she hopes to start taking classes at Florissant Valley Community College.
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In June, while she was at school, her 20-year-old son took her 11-year-old son to the doctor. The younger son has severe anxiety and ADHD and gets medical treatment 鈥 mostly giving him tools to cope with his conditions 鈥 twice a week.
鈥淗e鈥檚 got a lot of trauma in his life,鈥 Wortham says. 鈥淗e鈥檚 seen a lot of stuff.鈥
Before she moved her family to Florissant, they lived in the Walnut Park neighborhood in north St. Louis. Her sons saw shootings, drug deals, violence, death.
Wortham was shocked when she got the call.
鈥淭hey wouldn鈥檛 see him because he was dropped off of Medicaid,鈥 she remembers. 鈥淚 wasn鈥檛 even aware they dropped him.鈥
Wortham found herself caught up in a problem that has plagued Missouri for several years.
Since 2017, more than 100,000 children have been dropped from the Medicaid rolls, and many of them 鈥 if not most 鈥 are in families like Wortham鈥檚, where the children still qualify for services but through bureaucratic incompetence, a computer glitch or intentional indifference, have lost the lifesaving medical coverage they deserve and need.
In the last two years, Missouri has led the nation in this avoidable problem, seeing the number of children covered by Medicaid drop more than 16%, according to the latest numbers from the state.
Gov. Mike Parson and his Republican administration have cited an improving economy as the reason for the drop in Medicaid coverage, even though there鈥檚 no evidence to back that up, save for a slight improvement in the unemployment rate. Researchers at the recently found no connection between economic changes and the drop in health care coverage in many states, including Missouri.
Every day, people like Wortham end up calling organizations like the nonprofit to ask for help. And as the attorneys and advocates did for Wortham, they find out that the children still qualify for Medicaid coverage, and get them re-signed up, navigating the bureaucracy that is failing so many Missourians.
(Full disclosure: I am a client of the nonprofit, which is helping me get a friend of my family on Medicaid).
鈥淚t is extremely frustrating that people like Diedre, whose children clearly qualify, are having their coverage terminated,鈥 says Joel Ferber, director of advocacy for legal services. 鈥淗er family鈥檚 situation is but one example of the unnecessary procedural hurdles families are forced to jump through to maintain their coverage. Fortunately she had access to a legal advocate to help her regain coverage but not everyone is so lucky.鈥
The problems started long before the Parson administration.
In 2014, as the state tried to comply with Affordable Care Act provisions and transitioned to new software, all the while cutting employees in the Department of Social Services, various advocates for the poor started noticing problems. There were long waits for call centers, paperwork sent to old addresses, and a failure to check eligibility in existing databases such as food stamps or other temporary aid programs.
For a while, the administration of Gov. Jay Nixon started meeting weekly with advocates to go over problems and seek fixes. The Parson administration, however, has mostly behaved as though poor children losing Medicaid coverage is a good thing.
When people like Washington University professor Timothy McBride, who used to be the chairman of the Mo HealthNet Oversight Committee, complain about the number of children losing health care coverage, they, too, are ignored. After McBride raised issues in committee meetings and publicly called for changes, Parson removed him as head of the oversight committee.
鈥淚t still remains perplexing to me why so many children were dropped from the rolls,鈥 McBride says. 鈥淚 simply cannot find a reason in data I have seen to believe that 100,000 children no longer are eligible for Medicaid. Various alternatives to the process that Missouri has enacted have been proposed, but I think the state has not followed through on them.鈥
One of those proposals, suggested by Legal Services and other organizations, was to suspend dropping any children off Medicaid until the state figured out what problems were plaguing the system.
That鈥檚 what the state of Louisiana .
The state of Missouri hasn鈥檛 responded to the request. A spokeswoman from the Department of Social Services declined comment on whether such a move is under consideration.
Meanwhile, more mothers like Wortham are at risk of showing up at the doctor and finding out their children lack medical coverage.
鈥淚t was like a slap in the face,鈥 Wortham said. 鈥淚 had just filled out the paperwork for food stamps. I knew we qualified. I figured it was all supposed to be done together. It was a lot to deal with.鈥
She grew up in a place where her mother wouldn鈥檛 let her play outside. Wortham wants something better for her children.
鈥淚鈥檓 trying to build a path for them,鈥 she says.
It doesn鈥檛 help when the state of Missouri stands in the way.