As often as she can, Brandy Madison takes her children, Tanner, 18 months, and Phil Jr., 7 months, to Let’s Help, Inc. for lunch.
Let’s Help, a non-profit agency dedicated to ending or mitigating poverty, feeds about 400 people a day.
Most who come for the meals are homeless or near homeless. Young families such as Madison’s are a common sight there.
Madison, her boys, and their father are not homeless. They live with the father of a friend. They think they may have found somebody willing to rent them a place for $50 a month.
Madison, 25, is unemployed, so is the father of her sons. They’re living on public assistance.
Photo by Dave Ranney
Brandy Madison’s two young sons are enrolled in HealthWave. She and the boy’s father are unemployed and nearly homeless. HealthWave is one of the bright spots for the family, she said. Some report problems dealing with the paperwork involved with enrolling or re-enrolling in HealthWave, but Madison said all has worked well for her and her children.
“Nobody’s hiring,” Madison said.
The one bright spot in her family’s life, she said is HealthWave, the state-run health insurance program for children in low- and moderate-income families.
HealthWave covered Madison’s two pregnancies. She’s not on it now, but Tanner and Phil Jr. are.
“It’s a really good program for people like me who don’t have a lot of money to pay for things like prescriptions or doctor’s visits,” she said.
“My kids haven’t been sick that much, but when I take them to get their shots or their check ups, HealthWave pays for it,” she said. “What I worry about is taking them to the emergency room.”
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Madison said she’s heard stories of hospitals billing families not on HealthWave $3,000 for a single emergency room visit.
“There is no way I could ever pay for something like that,” she said.
In Kansas last month, more than 200,000 children and pregnant women were enrolled in HealthWave, which combines Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
HealthWave is available to children up to age 18 in households below 200 percent of the federal poverty level. After Jan. 1, HealthWave will cover children in households earning up to 250 percent of the 2008 poverty level, or $44,000 per year for a family of three.
Madison said she’s not had a problem enrolling or re-enrolling her sons in HealthWave.
But Terry Bayless, 20, hasn’t been as fortunate.
“It’s been a really good program,” she said. “But there was a time when they sent me some paperwork in the mail and my son got a hold of it and I couldn’t find it and then I forgot about it because we were going through a pretty hard time. Then, the next time I went to the doctor, they said I wasn’t on (HealthWave) anymore.
“So I called and they sent me the paperwork again and I sent it in right away,” Bayless said. “But it was like two or three months before we heard back from them. I don’t ever want to go through that again.”
Bayless and her husband, both unemployed, have a 1-year-old son, Rivr.
“I didn’t like it when Rivr wasn’t on HealthWave, but what really drives me crazy is when you call up there, you have to wait forever,” Bayless said. “You have to go through all this voice-activated stuff when, really, it would be faster if they just let you talk to a person instead of a computer.”
Most HealthWave enrollment forms are processed by the Kansas Family Medical Clearinghouse in downtown Topeka. The clearinghouse is run under state contract by Maximus, a Reston, Va.-based company.
Earlier this year, the Kansas Health Policy Authority awarded the clearinghouse contract to Policy Studies Inc. (PSI), a Denver-based company.
PSI’s administration of the clearinghouse begins Jan. 1.
-Dave Ranney is a staff writer for KHI News Service, which specializes in coverage of health issues facing Kansans. He can be reached at dranney@khi.org or at 785-233-5443, ext. 128.