The Department of Health Care Services (DHCS) recently released a series of proposals that would change the Coordinated Care Initiative (CCI) enrollment process to 1) passively enroll beneficiaries into Cal MediConnect; and to 2) streamline enrollment by allowing plans to eliminate or dramatically reduce the role of the enrollment broker.

The California Medical Association (CMA), in partnership with Justice in Aging and other patient advocacy groups, signed a joint letter strongly opposing the proposals.

The Coordinated Care Initiative was authorized by the state in July 2012 in an effort to save money and better coordinate care for the state’s low-income seniors and persons with disabilities. The program began with a three-year demonstration project that expected to see a large portion of the state's dual eligible beneficiaries transition to managed care plans.

Experience shows that passive enrollment strategies result in high opt-out rates, confusion, disruption in care, distrust of managed care and high costs to plans.

"These strategies simply do not work," the letter said. "The proposed enrollment changes ignore lessons learned from implementation thus far, and require substantial resources from DHCS, the plans, the enrollment broker and the stakeholder community to implement – resources that should be leveraged on improving the quality of the program and the beneficiary experience and thus promote retention."

Throughout the development of the Coordinated Care Initiative, DHCS and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) repeatedly promised to protect beneficiaries through the complicated transition into managed care. Yet, DHCS and CMS moved forward with program implementation, ignoring stakeholder recommendations to slow down and conduct additional systems testing. As a result, beneficiaries experienced significant disruption and confusion, and anticipated enrollment goals were not met.

Today, two years into implementation, health plans are just starting to deliver the coordination of benefits promised under this new delivery model. The enrollment proposals ignore DHCS’s own evaluation data and threaten to revert CCI back to the enrollment chaos of early implementation.

Click here to read the letter.