Network Health Executive Director Christina Severin
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Higher-than-expected enrollment has challenged the budget and the administration of public health coverage in Massachusetts
ever since its universal health plan took effect in April 2006. Christina Severin, executive director of Network Health in
Medford, Mass., a private plan that covers subsidized Commonwealth Care members as well as MassHealth Medicaid members, believes
programs will continue to struggle until one particular problem is solved: enrollment churning.
Christina Severin, Executive Director Severin has served as Network Health's vice president and COO as well as director of
quality. Previously, she was the director of managed care and practice management for Health Services Partnership. At Boston
City Hospital, she directed community health center services. With a master's degree in public health from Boston University
and a bachelor's degree in political economy from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, she has also taught healthcare
administration.
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Churning—the cycle of enrollment, loss of coverage and subsequent re-enrollment of the same members year after year—causes
administrative burdens and costly gaps in care. In most cases, it's not a matter of eligibility that causes the disenrollment,
it's a matter of paperwork. Aside from policy changes that affect eligibility, churning remains a practical administrative
issue that costs money, Severin says.
"We looked at 88,000 of our MassHealth members," she says. "Fifty-eight percent were disenrolled annually. Of those, 47% re-enrolled
within 30 days. Of all those who re-enrolled, 70% did so within 90 days."
Disenrolled by Default
At a glance
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There is a 45-day window in which members in Commonwealth Care or MassHealth must re-enroll, recently reduced from 60 days.
Members who miss that window, fail to complete paperwork or fail to submit supporting documents—even if they remain eligible
for benefits—are automatically disenrolled by the state.
Often members miss re-enrollment because reminders and materials do not reach them, Severin says. She believes churning might
be reduced if the challenging re-enrollment process itself were simpler for members and took into account the fact that people
receiving public assistance are difficult to reach. For example, only 25% of Network Health members' phone numbers are reliable.
Senior Director of Marketing Deborah Gordon says the plan makes multiple attempts to reach individual members by mail and
phone to remind them to re-enroll. On an aggregate basis, the plan initiates approximately 500,000 contacts per year, Gordon
says.
Some states have started to lean toward presumptive coverage continuation in public coverage programs, reducing re-enrollment
processes, according to Laura Summer, senior research scholar at Georgetown University's Health Policy Institute. Louisiana
program officials, for example, conduct internal member-eligibility reviews with available information from other programs
or state databases. Members found eligible in that process are re-enrolled. The method has dramatically reduced the number
of children who lose coverage at renewal and has reduced administrative costs as well.
"It's certainly to states' advantage from the perspective of administrative costs to curtail churning because every time they
have to disenroll then re-enroll a person, then potentially assign a person to a health plan and get them enrolled there again,
it is costly. And states certainly have limited resources," Summer says.
Presumptive disenrollment is a logical approach to ensure only those who qualify receive coverage, however, Severin believes
Massachusetts must find middle ground between the hard-line policy that drops eligible members and a free-handed approach
that might open up the system to abuse.
"We certainly share the state's values of not wanting people enrolled in Medicaid who don't meet the current eligibility criteria,"
she says. "At the same time, we feel that the data supports the fact that those who are disenrolled are disproportionately
people who are eligible."
While Network Health has a longer history of tracking churn with its Medicaid members, it now sees similar churn cropping
up in the new Commonwealth Care subsidized program. In March, the subsidized plan had 5,100 enrollments and 6,200 disenrollments,
for a net loss of 1,100 members, Gordon says.
"People like to talk about administrative waste and like to point the finger at health plans," Severin says. "But this is
where the health plan is saying we have an opportunity to decrease administrative inefficiencies."
Solutions have not come easily, however.
In 2004, Network Health worked with the state to create a one-page, simplified redetermination form that the plan could fax
to the state office. In piloting the shorter form, Network Health found that more members were able to continue coverage seamlessly
compared to members who had to complete the standard eight-page process. According to Gordon, state personnel processing the
incoming data could not keep pace with the volume of faxed re-enrollments, and Network Health was instructed to stop using
the simplified form immediately.
