BATON ROUGE - For more than 330,000 people in Louisiana who rely on Medicaid services, their health insurance policy will change in February following a 90-day contract extension.

It's one of six companies that provide Medicaid coverage in Louisiana, but some lawmakers are worried about the change, especially as it was initially set to end at the of December. That contract now set to end in February, The Advocate reported.

Lawmakers said they were nervous that cutting United's contract so close to the end of the year will leave people scrambling to find another provider. 

One month ago, Louisiana lawmakers recommended the state sign off on a deal that extended Medicaid coverage through the private company, but the very next day, the governor's office announced that the deal would end at the end of the month.

According to Attorney General Liz Murrill's office, Louisiana's Department of Health, which had to sign off on the deal, had not been told that her office had issues with United Healthcare.

"I think it was just an inadvertent lack of communication," Murrill said. "It's not insidious. They were doing one thing, I was doing another."

Back in 2022, then-Attorney General Jeff Landry sued UnitedHealthcare and its pharmacy benefit manager, alleging that the group overcharged for prescription drugs. When Murrill became Attorney General, the lawsuit continued. However, Murrill told a Senate committee on health and insurance that United had not been compliant and had not handed over documents that her office had requested.

However, some senators expressed concern about the short timeline and what the expiration of the UnitedHealthcare contract means for Medicaid recipients expected in the New Year.

LDH says in some cases, different people in a family will have different coverage from different providers. They say part of this transition will be to make sure that everyone, if a family chooses to, has the same coverage plan.

To address the short timeline, legislators wanted to extend coverage by ninety days and reassign healthcare plans for Medicaid recipients to other companies.

"Healthcare is very, very complicated, and so we need to make sure that we're giving the Department of Health and this administration more time to do the things that they need to do to make sure there is not a gap in coverage," State Sen. Patrick McMath said.

LDH says there will be multiple opportunities for Medicaid recipients to change their health care plans if they're not happy with the coverage they receive in the New Year.