End Call Center Experiment;
Increase Access to Services by Rebuilding Service Capacity at Local Level
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The Texas Health and Human Services Commission wants to revive its disastrous call center experiment. It recently issued for public comment a draft Request For Proposals (RFP) for potential call center vendors. The call center envisioned in the RFP is similar to HHSC’s call center experiment that failed so badly in 2006. Below are TSEU’s comments sent to HHSC. For more information, contact Will Rogers at 448-4225

The Texas State Employees Union believes that the first priority of the Health and Human Services Commission is to restore the quality of services in the eligibility programs. We oppose the efforts to privatize eligibility support services. Particularly in the face of the grave failings of the privatization and call center experiments over the past few years, we ask that HHSC stop plans to privatize and focus instead of rebuilding state eligibility services.

State human services eligibility programs - which for many years regularly won national recognition and enhanced funding for their high quality - have been devastated by four years of experimentation with down-sizing, call centers, privatization and poorly implemented large-scale technology projects. Services, particularly in the pilot region, are in shambles. People are not getting benefits in a timely manner. Accessibility to the state human services is not better but, rather, far worse, than prior to the privatization. The state is liable to lawsuits and federal penalties for these failings.

The solution to the problems in HHSC eligibility services is not to continue to put money and organization attention into reviving the privatization and call center plans, but rather to put those same resources into rebuilding the state’s own capacity to provide services locally to clients in need.

Our union believes that the failures of the Texas Access Alliance were not simply the shortcomings of one irresponsible or incapable contractor, but rather a problem of design. House Bill 2292 mandated that HHSC consider whether or not replacing local state employees with privatized call centers could improve services and save the state money. We argued then, as we argue now, that the plan would not accomplish either. The best model of service delivery for eligibility determination of TANF, Medicaid, Food Stamps and other benefit programs is to have a network of trained staff located in the communities they serve, who provide face-to-face assistance and who are accountable to the public and not to the bottom line of a private company. We contended that the case HHSC made for privatization and for call centers was wrong.

Over vocal public objections, the state moved forward on the plan. Today, there can be no doubt that the experiment largely failed. Millions of dollars were spent and the result is that there are unprecedented waiting lines for benefits. Clients are frustrated. Timeliness has hit levels unknown to long-time agency employees. The contractor was thrown off the contract. Contrary to the promise of Integrated Eligibility, what we have today is disintegrating eligibility services.

Among the problems of the design of this current RFP are many of the same issues from the last RFP in 2004. Still there are the deep coordination problems stemming from setting up a parallel system of private employees which must work with the state run system. These problems will not be resolved until state employees are responsible for the entire eligibility process involving client interactions or communications. Also, this contract continues to treat CHIP as a separate program administered by the vendor. However, a great deal of CHIP eligibility determination occurs in HHSC offices when people apply for Medicaid and find themselves eligibility for CHIP. The solution is to have state employees responsible for the eligibility determination for CHIP. This contract goes in exactly the opposite direction. At its heart, this RFP continues the wrong-headed policy of replacing local, trained, and publicly accountable state employees with far away, low-wage, and privately accountable vendor employees. The plan was wrong four years ago and it is wrong today.

We urgently ask that HHSC stop the privatization and call center experiments. We ask that HHSC stop the re-bidding process. We ask that the resources and focus of this agency be singularly devoted to rebuilding the services that have been destroyed.