Charlee Ormanovich spent 24 days without her caregiver. The paperwork that would have renewed her Medicaid was faxed from the Marshall County Community Resource Center in Plymouth, Indiana, and never arrived at the receiving office in Indianapolis. On September 1, 2026, her coverage ended. With it went her daily caregiver, her housekeeper, her prescription-pickup aide, her skills coach, and the Medicaid-funded therapies she had relied on for most of her adult life.
Ormanovich has been a Medicaid recipient for 37 years and lives with chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, a rare neurological condition. She told ABC57 she lost her caretaker the day the cancellation hit. “I was depressed,” she said. “I went through a depression so bad that I stopped my own medications.” ABC57’s Ellie Fideli reported the story on October 13.
The failure point was a fax line. When ABC57 reached the Office of Medicaid Policy and Planning, the office said the renewal paperwork had surfaced after the receiving line came back up; it had been down due to a technical glitch. REAL Services, a community provider that helps enroll Medicaid clients across Indiana, said its own calls and faxes to the Division of Family Resources were going into dropped lines. “We are seeing people that are falling through the cracks because of all the changes in Medicaid,” K.J. Mapes, the agency’s president and CEO, told ABC57.
What makes Ormanovich’s story particular is the absence of a second chance. A fax does not bounce. There is no portal receipt, no automated alert, no second channel the sender can check the next morning to find out whether their file sat in a tray or in the ether.
The sender fed pages into a machine at a resource center, took the confirmation sheet home, and waited. The receiving line was down; nobody told her. By the time the gap surfaced, it had already cost her 24 days of care.
Medicaid eligibility is one of the many places where the United States healthcare system still treats a fax as the official record. Why American doctors still fax covers the HIPAA, procurement, and interoperability reasons the technology stays in the pipeline, and our broader look at where fax persists lives at is fax still used. What this Indiana case shows is the fragility that lives inside those pipelines. When the single wire fails, there is no automatic retry, and the person at the far end can lose their caregiver before anyone notices the file is missing.
Ormanovich got her benefits back after 24 days of calls to the Medicaid office. The receiving line is back up. The design has not changed, and Mapes expects to keep seeing cases.