Human Services Caucus
. . . . . . . . . TSEU Organizer contact: Katie Romich

HHSC Dumps Evercare

. . . . HHSC announced that it will end a contract with Evercare (a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group) for the Integrated Care Management (ICM) program which provides Medicaid services to 74,000 people in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
The Dallas Morning News reports that over 1300 complaints were filed last year with HHSC about ICM including many reports of difficulty finding a doctor and problems with service coordination.
. . . . Before deciding to end the contract, the state had fined Evercare more than $1 million in the last year for lack of performance. Since 2003, Texas has paid UnitedHealth Group $1.2 billion to provide managed care services to over 255,000 Texans. Texas has fined UnitedHealth and Evercare seven times for more than $10 million due to various violations of contract agreements. The failure of Evercare can be added to a growing list of contracting out disasters including the $150 million paid to Accenture for poor performance eligibility determination.

Indiana Halts Human Services privatization rollout

. . . . Bowing to intense public criticism, Secretary Anne Murphy, chief of the Family and Social Services Administration of Indiana stopped any further rollout of the state’s automated welfare intake system until agency officials are sure that the system can handle an increase in demand for services. In 2007, the state signed a 10 year, $1.16 billion contract with IBM and various other private vendors to determine food stamp eligibility through call centers and a web based computer system.
. . . . Not surprisingly, Indiana’s private contract has suffered from the same problems that Texas suffered from under the Accenture contract. Lengthy telephone hold times, lost documents, and an inability to deliver benefits in a timely fashion to eligible clients. Advocates for quality services in Indiana have pointed to the failed experiment in Texas to argue for the stoppage of their state’s privatization efforts.
. . . . Letty Oliver, former Indiana caseworker and union lobbyist, told TSEU that the Indiana state employees union has bipartisan support for a bill in the Indiana state legislature to stop the roll-out permanently and to cancel privatization of services.