CM Restler on health insurance loss and community health workers
Restler emphasizes the urgency of vacant units with thousands sleeping on streets. He then asks about community health workers and the 233,000 people losing essential plan coverage, pressing on what insurance options exist and how navigators can help with Medicaid recertification.
I was really pleased by the article in Cranes this morning about the additional community health workers, and so I just wanted to run through this a little bit.
So our current estimates are that 233,000 people are going to lose access to health care.
They'll no longer be eligible for the essential plan after the changes that were made in Albany.
Yep.
And so just to give a sense, to have this on the record and for everyone to understand, that's a single person who's earning between $31,920 and $39,900.
So somebody making $30-something thousand a year, living in poverty, right, in New York City, cannot get by, between 200 and 250% of the poverty line, no longer has lost their health care as a result of the changes that...
That have been made.
So could you, I think there's two things I'd like you to speak to because I'm out of time and I don't want to, Chair Lee will kill me because she's got 16 more hearings today.
Firstly, how are these community health workers, what are the health care options, the health insurance options that these community health workers are going to be able to connect these very low income New Yorkers to now that they're no longer eligible for the essential plan?
And then secondly, I'm profoundly concerned about the 500,000 people that are going to lose access to Medicaid as a result of the new bureaucracy that is being imposed around recertification every six months.
I know that we don't have the terms yet from Albany, from the State Department of Health, on exactly what that process is going to look like, but how can those community health workers do more?
to proactively engage New Yorkers and try to make that process as easy as possible.
Is that part of the purview of, I believe, the 46 individuals that you're hiring with those $3 million?
Yeah, look, we could talk for hours on this.
I tried to go fast, but big questions.
We'll follow up with you, and it's clear that you understand this issue and really are committed to helping to address it, and so we're eager to work with you on this.