When paperwork errors knock dually eligible Californians off Medi-Cal, they lose more than care. They lose faith in the health care system.
Tiffany Huyenh-Cho, Justice in Aging's Director of California Medicare and Medicaid Advocacy, authored this blog for the California Health Care Foundation. In it, she discusses how easy it is for eligible older adults and people with disabilities who qualify for both Medicare and Medicaid to lose coverage because of bureaucratic barriers in the Medicare and Medicaid programs.
"Day to day, dually eligible enrollees shoulder the administrative burdens of two separate coverage sources. Accessing and renewing benefits involves daunting paperwork to prove eligibility. Countless opportunities for errors result from the fact that older adults overwhelmingly renew their Medi-Cal coverage manually. They fill out paper forms and mail them to county agencies. Simple mistakes such as scanning forms improperly can disenroll someone entirely.
The effects are striking. In January 2026, younger Medi-Cal enrollees were 50 times more likely to have coverage automatically renewed by the state than were older adults and people with disabilities. And one-quarter of all renewals in the Medi-Cal category that includes dually eligible enrollees ended in terminations. Of those terminations, 96% occurred not because a person was ineligible, but because of procedural issues such as incomplete paperwork or outdated mailing addresses."
