Long recounts NYC Care enrollment growth and decline since 2019
Narcisse asks how enrollment has changed since 2019 and whether recent Medicaid and Essential Plan changes increased enrollment. Long recounts his first NYC Care patient who hadn't seen a doctor in 43 years, says the program exceeded its 100,000 goal and peaked near 150,000, and attributes the decline to patients transitioning to Medicaid.
How has New York City Care enrollment changed since its launch in 2019?
And has the program experienced increased enrollment following recent changes to Medicaid and Essential Care, Essential Plan?
Yeah, thank you for asking.
So going back to 2019, because my team and I were the same team, we launched the program in 2019.
So I remember every detail of it.
And I'll tell you a quick anecdote about the first patient that I ever saw with NYC Care and talk about how that's contributed to the numbers increasing over time and some of the changes.
What NYC Care really did starting in 2019 is it unlocked healthcare access in a way that people didn't believe that they had it before.
My first patient was a woman that hadn't seen a doctor in 43 years.
Never had a mammogram, never had a pap smear, didn't know if she had diabetes.
I gave her everything, all the preventive care that she deserved in that visit.
I'm careful to use the word deserved because at the end of it, she started crying and I asked her why and she said,
before seeing me and enrolling in the NYC Care program, she'd never felt like she deserved, that was her word, care before.
It was heartbreaking, but it really stuck with me that that's the difference that we made in her life, and then I have no doubt she went and told 10 friends and family members, and within the first couple years of the program, we blew through our initial goal.
We initially set out to enroll 100,000 New Yorkers in the NYC Care program.
We blew through that, reached up to about 150,000 at the height of the program.
And since then, with today we're having 125,000.
The reason for us losing about 25,000 patients, the main reason is not a bad thing.
New York State, in the context of the program, has allowed for people that are 65 and above to enroll in Medicaid if they're low income, regardless of immigration status.
So we actually were able to have a lot of our NYC care patients that I know transition from being NYC care to New York State Medicaid.
But the good news is they're still at New York City Health and Hospitals.
That's a good one, to have people able to go to Medicaid.
But now, with the re-enrollment, it will be a problem for more folks to transition from NYC care to Medicaid for what's going on right now and the central plan.
And I truly believe in the work that you're doing.
We have been joined by...
Farias, Amanda, on Zoom.
So thank you for that, for having someone in New York City seeing a doctor after 43 years.
So that's been the work we're doing with NYC Care is so important.