The Medicaid office in Yazoo City was one of the buildings damaged in Saturday's deadly tornado.  One wonders how many records of ongoing claims for benefits were lost as a result.  Medicaid already has a  reputation for inefficiency in handling claims for initial benefits.  Clients frequently pay us to handle the claims process out of shear frustration with the process.  The twister will likely make an already inefficient system unmanageable.  The state should take note of document security and no down time as one of the the additional benefits of going to a paperless system for claim approval.  Of course the primary benefit of such a system would be efficiency.  Claims could be handled with greater efficiency if all applications and supporting documentation were simply scanned and handled by case workers on a paperless basis.  Such a system would save on storage costs (paper files take up space and must be securely stored), transport costs (as many of these files must be shuffled from office to office during the approval process), saved cost in submitting documentation (currently hard copies of requested documents are faxed or physically delivered, as Medicaid workers will not allow them to be emailed), and increased employee efficiency (as claim files in over-taxed offices could be routed to workers in other offices who had additional capacity at any given moment).  Along with these is the added benefit of protection of records against natural disasters.  All Medicaid workers at a damaged office would need to be back in operation processing claims would be a computer and a network connection.  No doubt if Medicaid were to privatize its claims processing, any vendor would immediately implement these efficiencies.  With Medicaid, despite hundreds of millions of dollars in shortfall, it is likely to be business as usual.