MCCAP—A Health Care Program Worth Restoring
Guest Columnist Maria Lizardo, La Nueva Mayoria / The New Majority
Navigating the healthcare system is daunting. Now, imagine navigating that system through barriers like limited literacy, limited English language skills, and limited familiarity with American bureaucracy. Add to those barriers competing needs like preventing your eviction, accessing basic benefits to make ends meet, or looking for living wage work.
As a settlement house, NMIC serves over 14,000 low-income families and individuals annually with a range of legal, social, education, and career services that address these barriers and competing needs. Among the many supports we offer our community, we enrolled 1,981 individuals in health care last year. However, we have no resources to provide post-enrollment support to ensure those enrollees have the knowledge and capacity to navigate the system effectively so they can maximize their benefits and health outcomes.
Between 1998 and 2010, the New York City Council funded the Managed Care Consumer Assistance Program (MCCAP) to help New York City residents navigate the healthcare system, resolve medical billing and debt issues, appeal plan decisions, and access affordable care. The program served around 140,000 residents, regardless of their type of insurance coverage, in all five boroughs through a grassroots community collaboration of 26 community-based organizations led by the Community Service Society.
NMIC was proud to be one of these programs, and the services we offered through it were critical to our community. Then, in 2010, MCCAP lost its City funding when hard budget choices were made during the Great Recession. While State legislators were able to secure some Affordable Care Act funds to establish a similar statewide consumer assistance program called Community Health Advocates (CHA) only 10 of the 26 MCCAP community-based organizations received new funding to continue providing services. As a result, New York City lost important resources to serve vulnerable populations like communities of color, immigrants, and non-English speaking residents. Compared to MCCAP, a smaller percentage of the statewide program consumers are racial and ethnic minorities and fewer services are provided in languages other than English. NMIC’s client base is 98% racial and ethnic minority and nearly 90% of those we enroll in health insurance speak a language other than English at home, making culturally competent services like MCCAP vital to our community.
New York City should restore $1 million in funding for MCCAP and leverage the infrastructure and expertise that the statewide consumer assistance program has developed to ensure that consumers, especially the most vulnerable, have somewhere to go for help with their post-enrollment needs. MCCAP is a particularly good investment in this tough fiscal year; an appropriation of $1 million of City funds for MCCAP will become $2 million by drawing down federal matching funds. It will also tap into existing, available capacity at CBOs like NMIC.
We all need healthcare to live better lives, but many of us don’t understand how to navigate the system to support our medical needs. Knowledge and support through MCCAP and agencies like NMIC can mean grandma meeting the monthly cost of her prescription and controlling her diagnosis instead of regularly visiting the emergency room because she doesn’t know she can access and afford preventative treatment. Help us reduce the cost of healthcare and improve vulnerable community members’ health in the process. We all deserve it.
Maria Lizardo LMSW, is Executive Director of NMIC, a nonprofit serving families and individuals in Northern Manhattan and the South and West Bronx. The views in this column are solely those of the writer. The New Majority is available on CSS’s Web site: www.cssny.org.