Targeting Medicaid Access

Robert Pear writes in today's New York Times that "Citizens Who Lack Papers Lose Medicaid." His opening paragraph:

A new federal rule intended to keep illegal immigrants from receiving Medicaid has instead shut out tens of thousands of United States citizens who have had difficulty complying with requirements to show birth certificates and other documents proving their citizenship, state officials say.

I'm going to comment first on the policy and then on the reporting. I think it is crazy that the rule was implemented without a provision that presumed that all children were citizens until a fairly long window elapsed during which their parents or guardians could formally establish their status. Pre-natal care should always be included, for the same reasons. There's no reason why the rule has to have the sort of impact during its phase-in period that Pear's subsequent report documents. Say what you like about illegal immigration, Medicaid, or poverty--none of them are the fault of these kids.

Now go back to how Pear wrote that sentence. I don't think his reporting justifies the use of the word "instead" in that sentence. To do so requires him to show that the policy is not making illegal immigrants ineligible for Medicaid. He has not done that. Here are three excerpts from the article that come closest:

“The largest adverse effect of this policy has been on people who are American citizens,” said Kevin W. Concannon, director of the Department of Human Services in Iowa, where the number of Medicaid recipients dropped by 5,700 in the second half of 2006, to 92,880, after rising for five years. “We have not turned up many undocumented immigrants receiving Medicaid in Waterloo, Dubuque or anywhere else in Iowa,” Mr. Concannon said.

[...]

“We’ve seen an increase in the number of people who don’t qualify for Medicaid because they cannot produce proof of citizenship,” said Albert A. Zimmerman, a spokesman for the Florida Department of Children and Families. “Nearly all of these people are American citizens.”

[...]

Wisconsin keeps detailed records listing reasons for the denial or termination of benefits. “From August 2006 to February of this year, we terminated benefits for an average of 868 people a month for failure to document citizenship or identity,” said James D. Jones, the eligibility director of the Medicaid program in Wisconsin. “More than 600 of those actions were for failure to prove identity.” In the same period, Mr. Jones said, the state denied an average of 1,758 applications a month for failure to document citizenship or identity. In 1,100 of those cases, applicants did not provide acceptable proof of identity.

The last one simply shows the policy is having an effect. It does not identify whether the effect is the intended or (presumably) unintended effect. In the first two, claims are made that the effect is largest among the largest population of Medicaid recipients. The effect may even be disproportionately large among the citizen group. But there is no evidence that it is confined to that group. There is no information in the article about California or Texas or even the paper's home state of New York, where we would expect the largest populations of illegal immigrants to be applying.

The fact that a rule is having unintended consequences does not by itself mean that it is not also having its intended consequences.