They don't mean immigrants, they mean people that are Illegal immigrants. the Washington Post is candy coating it again. They have had plenty of warning.
HHS is kicking immigrants off Obamacare coverage without fair warning, complaints allege
By Jason Millman September 30 at 1:00 PM

Warnings that people would lose coverage were only provided in English and Spanish, immigrant advocates say in new civil rights complaints. (Photo by Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg)

Potentially tens of thousands of people set to lose new health coverage on Tuesday didn't receive proper warning that they were at risk of becoming uninsured, new federal complaints allege.

About 115,000 people are expected to lose new coverage purchased through the federal health insurance marketplaces because they failed to provide documentation that they're U.S. citizens or they're legally present in the United States, the Department of Health and Human Services announced two weeks ago. But multiple notices from HHS warning people that they needed to provide further documentation were only provided in English and Spanish, failing to meet the diverse language needs of people purchasing Affordable Care Act coverage, according to immigrant advocacy groups filing the complaints on Tuesday.
“The hope is that the government takes these complaints seriously for these significant segments of the population … that they be given a fair chance to fix any problems they might have,” said Karen Tumlin, an attorney for the National Immigrant Law Center, which organized the complaints.

The complaints, filed by groups working predominately with Asian and Pacific Islander communities, claim that the federal notices mailed to consumers alerting them they could lose coverage were only provided in English and Spanish. They said the notices included “taglines” in several other languages notifying them of the availability of a customer service phone line offering interpreter services, but those taglines didn’t warn them their coverage was at risk. The Southeast Asian Mutual Assistance Associations Coalition, a Philadelphia-based group that filed one of the complaints, said the taglines also weren't in languages spoken by many of its clients, including Burmese, Lao, Nepali and Indonesian.

Tens of thousands more people may actually lose their coverage because HHS has only reported statistics for the 36 states where the federal government is running the new ACA insurance marketplaces. For instance, as many as 50,000 households that purchased coverage through California's state-run marketplace, or exchange, still had unresolved residency issues ahead of the state's Tuesday deadline to provide documentation.

The advocacy groups said they had previously asked HHS officials to provide more substantial translations for vital notices related to health insurance. The complaints, filed with the HHS Office for Civil Rights, said failure to provide the notice in more languages violates the ACA'snondiscrimination requirements.

“What we’re asking for is so minimal in that sense that it doesn’t have to be necessarily a translation of every single word,” Tumlin said. “What we needed in these other languages is one to two sentences."

The advocates provided an embargoed copy of complaint filings to the Washington Post on Monday. Earlier this month, federal officials said those losing their coverage didn't respond to multiple notices or didn't meet documentation requirements. The number of people losing coverage is significantly lower than the 966,000 who in June had unresolved immigration or citizenship discrepancies.

A spokesman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the agency overseeing the insurance marketplaces, did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday afternoon.

Advocates say they're not sure how many people may have been affected by language barriers, but they believe it could be in the tens of thousands. In a separate Freedom of Information Act request also filed with HHS on Tuesday, the advocacy groups ask how many of the 115,000 people losing their federal marketplace coverage had indicated to HHS that they wanted to receive correspondence in a language other than English. They also ask how many of those losing coverage tried resolving their immigration status ahead of the department's Sept. 5 deadline to provide documentation.

As many as another 279,000 people could soon lose some or all of their premium subsidy if they don't resolve a discrepancy between the incomes they reported and what the government has on record for them. Their premiums will be adjusted in November if they don't meet a Tuesday deadline to provide income documentation.

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