ATLANTA — A glitch that temporarily deactivated Medicaid care for thousands of families with children with severe disabilities has been resolved, but families want to make sure it does not happen again.
The Katie Beckett Medicaid program helps provide care to kids with disabilities. But that glitch caused many of them to learn their service was canceled while at appointments on Monday.
Channel 2’s Michael Doudna spoke to a family who says the glitch gave them quite the scare.
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When Charlee Kilpatrick was 6 months old, doctors discovered that she had a condition known as listencephaly, which requires the care of specialists from neurologists to eye doctors to therapists.
“That can add up to several hundred to a thousand dollars a month. Most people don’t have a lot of extra cash lying around,” Kelli Kilpatrick said.
She says it took five months of labor and paperwork to get into the Katie Beckett Medicaid program.
“Once you’re approved, it’s like this giant weight is lifted off your chest,” Kelli Kilpatrick said.
On Monday, she was at a therapist appointment for her daughter when she learned a glitch showed that her daughter had been removed from the program.
“It was one of those things where dollar signs just kind of started rolling through my head,” she said.
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The Department of Community Health says an IT issue caused the eligibility status of Katie Beckett families to “be flagged and changed incorrectly. As a result, these members received termination notices or saw their coverage end in error.”
“I don’t want to think that I need to go in every month and recheck it, but it makes me wonder, you know, am I going to need to do that from here on out?” Kelli Kilpatrick said.
DCH says they are fixing the program, and when Kelli Kilpatrick checked on Tuesday evening, her daughter’s status seemed to have been restored.
“There was no ill intent. We’re all human. But we need to make sure that everybody’s, everything’s in order,” she said.
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