A handful of people with disabilities who use a Medicaid waiver for in-home care and other services are filing a class action lawsuit against the Maryland Department of Health for being unlawfully disenrolled from the program.

The suit could encompass as many as 18,000 Marylanders with intellectual and developmental disabilities who used the waivers prior to May 2023 to pay for care.

The suit states that after the COVID national emergency ended, residents were required to confirm their eligibility for Medicaid.

However, the plaintiffs allege Maryland’s process for doing that is dysfunctional and arbitrarily disenrolled people from the program.

“The real mystery here is that we don't know exactly why this is happening,” said Kevin Docherty, a partner at Brown, Goldstein and Levy, who is working on the case. “All we know right now is that the system is broken because a large number of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities are being terminated from these waivers.”

The plaintiffs say that hundreds of residents with disabilities have been disenrolled from their programs without proper notice, even though they are eligible for Medicaid and for waivers.

MDH announced Monday it’s consolidating three of its Medicaid waiver programs managed by the Developmental Disabilities Administration into one program to make services easier to access and to avoid future issues.

The new Community Pathways waiver program allows intellectually and developmentally disabled residents to go through one process to get waivers for Medicaid care.

The waivers allow those residents to use Medicaid for services like residential programs, at-home care, daycare and day services instead of institutional care.