Thousands of South Carolina residents who filed for Medicaid between October and mid-July are still waiting to find out if they qualify for the government’s low-income health insurance program.
While most Medicaid applications are typically approved or denied within six days, the state agency responsible for processing the paperwork hasn’t been able to keep pace with an influx from HealthCare.gov.
More than 43,000 South Carolina Medicaid applications were submitted through the new federal health insurance marketplace between Oct. 1 and July 13, but the S.C. Department of Health and Human Services has only managed to make its way through 25 percent of them.