Topeka ? State officials said Thursday that it will take seven more months to resolve thousands of cases involving Kansas children who lack health coverage because of federal proof-of-citizenship rules.

“We expect that backlog to be resolved by January,” Connie Hubbell, chairwoman of the Kansas Health Policy Authority, told a legislative oversight committee.

Some lawmakers were not pleased with the report.

State Sen. Roger Reitz, R-Manhattan, a physician, said the federal requirements were “major, divisive elements that I think should not be allowed to exist.”

State health officials have wrestled with the problem for months after Congress and President Bush adopted a law last year that requires Medicaid applicants to show proof of U.S. citizenship, through a birth certificate or other documentation.

The proof-of-citizenship measure was inserted in the federal deficit reduction law as a way to prevent illegal immigrants from getting benefits from Medicaid, the federal-state program that provides health care services to low-income people.

But state officials said the requirement has produced a backlog of 18,000 to 20,000 Medicaid applications. Many of those are eligible Kansans who don’t have the necessary paperwork, they have said.

Marcia Nielsen, executive director of the Kansas Health Policy Authority, said states have been lobbying Congress so they can administer the citizenship requirements in their own ways.

“There is movement now in Congress to allow states to have their own methods,” Nielsen said. “This was a horrendous lapse of judgment,” she said of the federal law.

Among states, Kansas has been one of the worst affected because officials here followed the law so closely, Nielsen said.

At the time the law took effect, Kansas also was being audited by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services over questionable spending practices. Those audits resulted in lawmakers recently allocating approximately $100 million and instituting numerous changes to satisfy CMS.

“We were following the letter of the law considering how much hot water we were in,” Nielsen said.

But recently several other states also have found problems with the citizenship requirement.

KHA officials said funds approved by the Legislature will allow the agency to hire additional staff to manage the increasing workload at its Medicaid clearinghouse. Lawmakers approved $81,105 in state funds for the current fiscal year, and $623,731 for the next fiscal year, which starts July 1.