Tanisha Corporal: Doing Everything Right and Still Getting Denied Coverage

At 49 years old, Tanisha Corporal is a licensed master social worker in Atlanta who has worked in the field for more than two decades. For years, it was her job to help other Georgians access benefit programs — expertise she never expected to need for herself. When she left her position at a faith-based nonprofit to start her own project, the Be Well Black Girl Initiative, she lost her health coverage, and forgoing it wasn’t an option. She had pre-diabetes and other health concerns to manage. “I have breast cancer in my family history,” she said. “So, I’ve got to get my mammograms.”

On paper, Tanisha qualified for Pathways to Coverage, Georgia’s Medicaid program, meeting the work reporting requirements associated through her volunteer work with the nonprofit Focused Community Strategies and other South Atlanta community efforts. She gathered her documentation and submitted it through the state’s online portal, confident it would go through without issue. Instead, the outcome caught her off guard. “We were denied. I was like, this makes no sense,” said Tanisha, “I did everything right.”

What followed was eight months of resubmitting documents that bounced back or disappeared into the portal, along with repeated rounds of denials and appeals for both herself and her son, a full-time college student. Case after case came back rejected, often for reasons that made little sense given what she’d actually submitted. She read one of her denial letters: “Your case was denied because you didn’t submit the correct documents. And you didn’t meet the qualifying activity requirement.”

Reaching anyone at the state Medicaid agency to sort out what had gone wrong was its own struggle, and the responses she did get often contradicted what was actually happening on her end. “They’ll say they called you and we look at our call log. Nobody called me,” she said. “And the letter will say, you missed your appointment and it’ll come on the same day.”

Her application was finally approved in March, after she spoke publicly about her experience at a hearing covered by Atlanta news outlets.

But getting approval didn’t end the paperwork. Since enrolling a year and a half to two years ago, Tanisha has had to keep submitting documentation to verify her volunteer hours. The state’s system continued to struggle processing her uploads, and at one point a caseworker told her a verification letter from her volunteer organization couldn’t be confirmed because it was missing a phone number, even though the number was there. The error cost her coverage for about a month, and she only found out why after reaching out to a supervisor herself. For someone managing pre-diabetes and monitoring a family history of breast cancer, even a brief, unexplained gap in coverage means a month without a safety net to catch problems early.

For a long stretch, the Gateway portal wouldn’t accept PDF uploads at all, forcing her to screenshot each document and submit it as a photo instead. That particular glitch appears to be fixed now. Even so, staying compliant remains time-consuming: between contacting her volunteer organization, waiting on the paperwork, uploading it, and waiting for confirmation, she estimates it takes three to four hours a month just to keep her coverage. The uncertainty weighs on her daily. “It’s a constant fear that I’m gonna go to the doctors or go to the pharmacy and I’m gonna be told that my coverage is terminated,” she said.

Her medical care itself has been a mix of relief and frustration. Primary care and her hypertension medication have been covered without issue for two years, and her prescription costs have actually dropped compared to what she paid under employer-sponsored insurance, with most copays around 50 cents and one costly injectable medication running her just $3 a month. The tradeoff is that Pathways only covers 30-day supplies instead of the 90-day supplies she used to get, meaning more frequent pharmacy runs.

Behavioral health care has been harder to hold onto. Her longtime psychologist, whom she has seen for nearly a decade, doesn’t accept Medicaid, and providers who do take Pathways are often not accepting new patients, so she has had to stretch out the time between sessions. Her longtime GYN and her ophthalmologist don’t take Medicaid either. Continuing to see her psychologist out of pocket has landed on a credit card, building what she describes as a significant amount of debt that keeps collecting interest.

The strain has weighed on her family as well. Her 23-year-old son, a full-time college student working part time as a busboy, lost his Pathways coverage in July after the state counted his tip income along with his base pay, pushing him over the eligibility threshold. The timing was especially hard, landing right before a round of annual checkups the family had to pay for out of pocket on credit cards.

Even with coverage secured, Tanisha still struggles. “It’s still a nightmare. Even once I got through the red tape and got approved,” she said. “Now maintaining it is bringing another level of anxiety.”

She wants policymakers to understand where the system is breaking down. She believes caseworkers need more trauma-informed customer service training and are overburdened by their caseloads, and she’d like to see the verification process simplified, eligibility income limits raised, and a system that can confirm employment and income automatically rather than relying on manual document uploads that keep getting lost. “I think the system has to be simplified,” she said. If a social worker who has spent her career guiding others through the safety net is struggling to keep her own coverage, it raises the question of how many people without her knowledge, persistence, or platform are falling through the same cracks and never being heard at all.