Long explains three enrollment pathways and financial counseling
Long explains that every enrollee goes through financial counseling, and those ineligible due to immigration status or affordability can enroll by phone via MyChart, in person, or through CBO partners. He notes lack of phone or internet access as a barrier and cites DOH form 5090 for self-attestation of identity.
Yeah, it's a really good question, and I'll answer it.
There's three specific ways you can enroll.
Before I go to that, I want to make an important point.
The enrollment process for NYC Care starts, before I go into the details, with seeing if you're eligible for insurance.
If you're eligible.
If you're eligible for insurance, we want to enroll you in insurance.
If you're eligible for Medicaid, we want to enroll you in Medicaid.
It's better for you and better for our system, better for our city.
So the first step of enrollment is every single NYC Care enrollee has to go through what we call financial counseling, or in other words, to see if they're eligible for health insurance.
For those that aren't eligible, which will happen for two reasons, the first reason being based on immigration status, the second reason being if it would cost you too much money based on federal
guidelines to be able to reasonably afford health insurance, then we would offer to enroll you in the NYC Care program.
And there's three ways that that happens.
The first is we could do it actually all over the phone now.
So we would talk to you on the phone.
We could register you in MyChart, which is like a portal you get on your phone, and you can actually upload the documents that I need you to upload through MyChart.
So it's a fairly seamless process that way.
A barrier that we've seen there, to answer your question about barriers, is if you don't have a phone or internet access, that would be a barrier to using that phone-based option because it does rely on you giving us the documents.
In that case, we transitioned to option two, which is in-person enrollment.
So you can come and enroll in person, even if you've been evaluated for health insurance by the phone, or you can do the whole thing in person.
So I have patients that are coming in to see me for the first time.
They'll go through the whole insurance eligibility process and then either end up with an insurance plan or NYC care in the context of seeing me.
The third way you can enroll is through one of our trusted partners, one of our community.
based organizations.
They go through a similar process.
So you'll be evaluated for health insurance, and if you aren't eligible for health insurance, they can enroll you in the program.
And there's certain forms that they ask you for that they can help you to upload.
I'll give you an example here of one of the forms.
So there's the DOH form 5090, which is your self-attestation of identity if you don't have the standard forms.
So we work with you based on where you are to make sure that if you have the standard forms or if you don't, you can fill out that form to have you upload the right documents so we can enroll you in the program quickly.