New York City Comptroller William C. Thompson, Jr. issued a report today recommending a series of measures to help eligible New Yorkers gain easier access to Medicaid and other publicly funded health insurance programs. In "Cut the Red Tape," Comptroller Thompson proposed federal and state reforms to dismantle bureaucratic hurdles and streamline the insurance application and recertification process.

"Approximately 1.7 million New York City residents are uninsured," Thompson said in the nine-page report. "Roughly 900,000 are eligible for one of the State's publicly funded health insurance programs, but are not enrolled."

"A major reason so many eligible people remain uninsured is that the state-mandated rules for these programs, particularly Medicaid, make enrolling extremely difficult, especially for non-English-speaking applicants. Eligibility criteria are highly technical and confusing and applications call for onerous amounts of back-up documentation," he noted.

Comptroller Thompson delivered the report to Governor Pataki, Mayor Bloomberg, Senators Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, and City Council Speaker Gifford Miller.

On Monday, the U.S. Commerce Department's Census Bureau reported that between 2000 and 2001 the number of uninsured Americans rose by 1.4 million, to 41.2 million. Census officials found that 15.9 percent of all New Yorkers did not have health insurance coverage for the entire year during that period.

Thompson pointed out that the steep number of uninsured New Yorkers exacts both a human and financial toll. For those without insurance, routine check-ups and preventative services are a luxury, triggering health problems that often go untreated until they become serious enough to warrant hospitalization. According to the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured, uninsured babies also have a lower survival rate than those with insurance, and uninsured adults have a significantly higher mortality rate.

During Fiscal Year 2001, the City's public hospital system, the Health and Hospitals Corporation (HHC), estimated it treated roughly 545,000 uninsured patients, most of whom did not pay for their care. The City's Fiscal Year 2003 budget projects an operating loss of $251 million, which is attributable in large part to the cost of treating so many uninsured patients.

"Increasing insurance enrollment among HHC's eligible uninsured patient population would go far toward reducing these deficits," Thompson reports.

The Comptroller pointed to the "Disaster Relief Medicaid" program, which was enacted after the World Trade Center attack to simplify temporary enrollments and lift bureaucratic obstacles. The process involved a simple, one-page application instead of a complicated, multi-page document. In a four-month period, that program generated 340,000 enrollments - 10 times the number of people who typically enroll during a comparable period.

Comptroller Thompson's plan would require action on both a state and federal level. He urged State officials to speed up reforms in the Health Care Reform Act of 2000. While Governor Pataki approved the measure to streamline some elements of the State's health insurance programs on Jan. 25th, those changes do not take effect until April 1, 2003.

Thompson maintained that documentation and application requirements for programs such as Medicaid, Child Health Plus A and B, and the Family Health Plan should be consistent and equally free of red tape. Further, the Comptroller called for a reduction in "unnecessary" documentation requirements.

Finally, the Comptroller called upon the federal government to permanently adjust its funding formula so that New York City and State receive their fair share of Medicaid costs. Currently, the House is considering a measure to temporarily increase the amount of federal Medicaid dollars available to the states. In Fiscal Year 2002, New York City incurred costs from increased enrollment through Disaster Relief Medicaid of roughly $110 million. These costs could climb to $130 million per year if half of those enrollees transition into Medicaid and FHP.