Wisconsin failing to approve Medicaid and food stamps applications in timely manner

Socked by tens of thousands of childless adults applying for a new state health plan, Wisconsin is failing to meet requirements in federal law for timely approvals of applications for both the Medicaid health coverage and food stamps.

Since June 15, more than two-thirds of childless applicants with virtually no income - the highest priority cases - haven't received food stamps within the federally required seven days, state figures show. Nearly two-thirds of all the childless adults seeking food stamps haven't received them within the required 30 days.

The same process is used to check whether applicants are eligible for both Medicaid and the federal FoodShare, or food stamps, program. Officials from the state Department of Health Services met Monday with federal officials to brief them on the delays and said they would seek to resolve the most pressing backlogged food stamp cases by the end of this week.

"We're going to have to work as hard as we can over the next eight weeks to deal with this really incredible backlog and volume of applications," said Health Services secretary Karen Timberlake. "It's absolutely unacceptable ... We need to get those applications processed in a timely way."

The good news for needy state residents without children is that thousands more are getting health coverage and food stamps. But the time taken to process these claims, already longer than the federal average, has shot up dramatically since these low-income residents started signing up for Medicaid through the BadgerCare Plus Core plan on June 15.

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