Thousands of Alaskans are still caught in backlogs as they try to get government benefits intended to help people facing disabilities and poverty.
That’s despite a yearslong effort by state officials to keep up with paperwork. And some say the problems will only get worse with new federal work requirements for Medicaid.
One Alaskan caught in the quagmire is Juneau resident Joy Lee.
Several times a month, Lee faces unimaginable pain.
“All of a sudden you've got half your mouth is a toothache, and your eyeball’s falling out of your face, and your face is on fire, and you've got a severe earache — but it’s not real,” she said in a recent interview.
Lee is 63. She has multiple sclerosis, a treatable, but ultimately incurable, autoimmune disease. One of her symptoms is a chronic pain condition known as trigeminal neuralgia.
For a while, she said, she could manage it. At one point, she recalled, she had to be on a work call while lying on the floor during an episode. But eventually, it got to be too much.
Lee exited the workforce in 2007, after working since the age of 14. She qualified for disability payments from Social Security. She started receiving state-administered aid from Adult Public Assistance and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.
These days, from her Juneau apartment, Lee spends a lot of time keeping up with all the paperwork — saving digital files, paper backups, all her receipts. She likes to think she’s on the ball.
So Lee was shocked when the state said she wasn’t.
“I sent in all my paperwork, and then 30 days later, I got a notification saying that they didn't get my paperwork and I was having all my benefits cut,” she said.
Lee called the Division of Public Assistance, the state agency that handles Medicaid, SNAP, Adult Public Assistance and other benefits programs.
“They looked at my paperwork and said, ‘Yeah, we've got all your paperwork, but it's an automatic letter, because there's no agents to do the cases,’” she said.
Lee called it a “paperwork nightmare.” And she’s far from alone.
It’s a problem that first gained public attention thanks to reporting by KTOO beginning in 2022. Despite court orders, lawsuits and efforts by state officials to address the issue, it persists.
Lee’s struggle is “a variation of a story that we've heard many times,” said Nick Feronti, an attorney with the Northern Justice Project, which has sued the state on behalf of Alaskans unable to access social safety net programs like SNAP, Medicaid and Adult Public Assistance. It’s hard to see evidence that things are improving, he said.
“They are either getting worse or maintaining, and there has not been much positive news, which is very sad for the residents of our state,” Feronti said.
Feronti feels like lawmakers and the governor haven’t prioritized eliminating the backlog, he said. He contrasted that with the attention state leaders give to the Permanent Fund Dividend.
“If our PFDs were delayed, people would be in the streets, and the executive branch of our government would take notice and fix the PFD delays right away,” he said. “But I think that because this is happening to poor people or to disabled people, they are pushed to the margins of our society, and they are neglected.”
As of the latest report on July 1, the state is only processing about half of Alaskans’ applications for SNAP benefits on time. But state officials say they are making progress — in June, the state told a federal court its SNAP backlog declined by 16%.
“I'm here every day working to solve the problem,” Division of Public Assistance Director Deb Etheridge said in an interview. “I have just an amazing group of eligibility technicians and amazing, you know, tremendous support from the commissioner's office and the governor's office to work towards (a) solution.”
But nearly 4,000 Alaskans are still caught in the SNAP backlog, and nearly 800 applications for the Adult Public Assistance program have languished for more than a month.
In the state’s Medicaid program, the backlog is much larger. Nearly 30,000 Alaskans are awaiting delayed decisions on their applications, according to state data provided by Feronti.
Etheridge emphasized that many stalled Medicaid applications are likely duplicates, and she said people with pending applications are still able to access medical care.
“We have a team that works with providers to receive that information and process anything that's identified as urgent and emergent,” she said. “We're really trying to work on all fronts.”
On average, it now takes 45 days for the state to process SNAP applications, roughly two weeks longer than federal law requires. That number has risen this year, due in part, Etheridge said, to the division’s decision to prioritize older cases.
“We want to get everybody closer to 30 days. We don't want to have those aging,” she said.
But Etheridge says people caught in the backlog and people like Joy Lee, who are at risk of losing them, do have options. One is to file a request for what’s known as a “fair hearing.” That’s an option for anyone who’s received an adverse decision from the Division of Public Assistance, whether related to SNAP, Medicaid, heating assistance, Adult Public Assistance or something else.
The division’s call center can help people apply for fair hearings, Etheridge said. Alaskans can also request them via email.
Feronti, the attorney, said Alaskans having trouble accessing SNAP and Adult Public Assistance can contact his firm for help.
The Division of Public Assistance is also hiring aggressively and having some success filling positions, Etheridge said. But despite her best efforts, she said she’s not sure when the division will be able to catch up.
“We're still working our way out of it, and so I would be naive to say a date,” Etheridge said.
This year’s state budget funds 15 new benefits processing jobs, but staffing levels are still roughly 20% lower than they were before lawmakers and the governor cut more than 100 positions in 2021, according to state budget documents.
Benefits processor and state employee union official Billy Stapleton Jr. said that’s the root of the problem: not enough staff.
“There's no Band-Aid fix,” he said. “We need a permanent solution to do this job correctly, and we just simply need more workers.”
In the coming years, Stapleton said, there’s reason to believe the problem will get significantly worse as a result of Medicaid changes included in President Trump’s so-called “big, beautiful bill.” Once its provisions take effect in the coming years, it will require some Medicaid recipients to prove they’re working or volunteering — and file forms with the state twice a year rather than annually.
That means even more paperwork.
For now, Joy Lee said the Division of Public Assistance has told her she won’t be cut off. At least, not this month.
But thousands aren’t so lucky, she said. Lee wishes more Alaskans would stand up and tell their leaders it’s unacceptable, she said.
“You gauge a country by how it takes care of the least of these,” she said, referencing a passage from the Bible. “When our country all of a sudden doesn't care about anybody … it just breaks my heart.”
