Flood of Applicants Cause Backlog for New Jersey’s FamilyCare Plan

About 102,000 New Jersey adults have applied for FamilyCare -- the state's health care expansion through CHIP as allowed by a federal waiver to provide insurance to middle- and low-income working adults -- within the program's first three months, causing a "bottleneck of paperwork" and a "backlog" of applications, the Newark Star-Ledger reports. So far, the state has enrolled 75,000 individuals in FamilyCare, but has yet to notify about 27,000 applicants whether they qualify and still fields up to 100,000 phone inquiries per week. State officials heavily advertised FamilyCare last fall to parents of the 75,600 children who are eligible for the KidCare (the state's CHIP program) and Medicaid, after the state was "criticized for failing to spread the word" about KidCare. But state officials had not anticipated the "overwhelming" response -- an indication of how "critical" the program is to "thousands of struggling families," state Human Services department spokesperson CeCe Lentini said. She added that the department's contractor processes 1,000 applications per day, but "[i]t still will take a month or two to reduce the backlog, and we are still receiving new requests." The state estimated that 125,000 New Jersey residents would qualify for FamilyCare. Once enrollment reaches that level, new applicants will be placed on a waiting list (Livio, Newark Star-Ledger, 2/23).