MIAMI — The Medicaid call center in Florida is experiencing long wait times and high rates of disconnection that could be preventing qualifying families from renewing or accessing Medicaid coverage, according to a report by UnidosUS, a national Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization.

Around 1 million people, 17% of Floridians enrolled, have lost coverage since April 2023, which is when the state started redetermining Medicaid eligibility for the first time since 2020. During the pandemic, Congress had put in place provisions barring states from ending Medicaid coverage regardless of whether or not they qualified, but that expired last year.

Florida’s drop in Medicaid enrollment is the second largest in the country after Texas, according to the UnidosUS study.

Eight in 10 calls automatically disconnected

Issues with the call center are at the heart of the problem, UnidosUS’s Florida political director Jared Nordlund said. One way the state decides whether a person is no longer eligible for Medicaid, he explained, is if they don’t respond to correspondence mailed to them. Many times people have questions surrounding the mailer they’ve received and are not sure what they need to do in order to avoid being dropped. Yet, when they try reaching out to the state’s Medicaid call center, it’s nearly impossible to get through to a real person.

The report found that 8 in 10 calls to Florida’s Medicaid call center were automatically disconnected from the phone system. When people managed to get through, there were long delays to reach a live receptionist.

“For Florida families who rely on hourly wages to make ends meet, spending hours just to connect is a costly proposition,” said Nordlund. “We have to meet people where they are and right now they are frustrated and scared. The state has the money to fix the call center problem; they’re just choosing to ignore it.”

For English speakers, the average wait time was 66 minutes, almost double what it was in July 2023. And for those who speak Spanish, the wait time was 47 minutes, which went down from the hour and 35 minutes people were waiting in July 2023.

NBC News has reached out to the Florida Department of Children and Families, which administers the program, and has not received an immediate response.

Medicaid provides health insurance for lower income individuals and it’s mostly administered by states, though the majority of the funding comes from the federal government.

According to the study, the long wait times could be contributing to loss in Medicaid coverage.

A significant portion of the Medicaid population “needs access to real live people who can help them with the redetermination process, which is why the continued failures of the state’s call center only compound problems instead of solving them,” Nordlund said. “In addition to the digital divide that keeps many from being able to access the process online, there is often a linguistic barrier or a need for guidance with the forms.”

Two consumer advocacy groups filed a lawsuit in a Florida federal court las summer seeking to stop the state from terminating residents’ Medicaid coverage. The Florida Health Justice Project and the National Health Law Program filed the suit on behalf of three residents arguing that the notices being sent to inform people they no longer qualify are confusing and don’t explain well why the individual is being dropped.

As many Floridians have had their Medicaid coverage terminated, the number of people enrolled in the Affordable Care Act has spiked. Florida leads the country in ACA enrollment, with 4.2 million residents signing up during the recent open enrollment period.

The decrease in Medicaid coverage is not the only reason for the rise in ACA sign-ups, though. Enhanced subsidies offered during the pandemic and extended through 2025 as part of the Inflation Reduction Act has made it less costly to sign up for health plans.

The UnidosUS report is a follow-up to one released by the organization in August 2023 that found Spanish speakers had to wait nearly four times longer than English-language callers.

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This article was originally published on NBCNews.com