DALLAS -- A health care company hired to manage a program for elderly Texans as part of a broad privatization plan was fined more than $1 million by the state in the past year over mounting complaints that included delayed or denied medical care.

Evercare of Texas, a unit of Minnesota-based UnitedHealth Group, has drawn the ire of some powerful Austin lawmakers over its management of preventative and long-term care for the state’s most vulnerable, The Dallas Morning News reported Sunday in the first of a four-part investigative series.

“There has been problem after problem after problem, and it’s unacceptable,” said state Sen. Jane Nelson, a Flower Mound Republican who chairs the Health and Human Services Committee.

Steven McGee, a 55-year-old Fort Worth truck driver disabled by multiple sclerosis, tried to enroll after receiving a packet from Evercare in advance of a care program that was to launch Feb. 1 last year. He said the first three people he talked to didn’t know what he was talking about, and the fourth “thought I was some kind of nut that somehow had gotten through to her office,” McGee said.

After McGee convinced her that he had a company pamphlet in hand, the Evercare representative put him on hold for a few minutes.

“She came back and said, ‘I understand what you’re talking about now because I Googled it,”’ McGee said. But she couldn’t help assign him a service coordinator.

Beth Mandell, the regional executive director of Evercare of Texas, said the company was committed to “addressing issues as we’re made aware of them.” She said program expansion in Texas challenged the company’s resources and that staff for the North Texas plan has expanded 24 percent.

“It was a massive undertaking,” Mandell said. “In working out the different systems, the workflows, there were some challenges.  But Evercare has a history of delivering these kinds of programs pretty successfully, and that is what we’re focused on right now.”

Last February, the Texas Health of Human Services Commission fined Evercare $645,890 after a flood of complaints that doctors weren’t accepting Evercare soon after the expansion of Texas’ Star Plus program. That plan uses an HMO model to deliver acute and long-term care of elderly and disabled Medicaid patients.

A month later, the commission fined Evercare another $70,725 for payment and service infractions. The most recent fines, totaling nearly $400,000, were in reaction to mounting complaints about the North Texas program.

McGee, the Fort Worth truck driver, went seven months without reaching a medical coordinator, while Willis Stewart, a 61-year-old carpet layer from the Commerce area, said he has waited three months for approval to get dentures after his teeth were pulled for treatment of mouth cancer. Mary Hunt, a 72-year-old widow, said she has waited months for dental care.

“They ought to call them ‘Nevercare,”’ Hunt said.

The state fielded more than 1,300 complaints from February

through early December of last year, but Evercare began to act after getting questioned by Gov. Rick Perry’s office and some powerful Republican lawmakers.

Evercare is part of a vast expansion of health care outsourcing that state officials believe is saving the state millions of dollars. Since 2003, the state has paid Evercare and other UnitedHealth units more than $1.2 billion to provide managed care to more than 255,000 Texans under four programs.

Texas is near the bottom among the 50 states in per-capita spending on health and human services, but it is a leader in outsourcing these functions to private contractors.

“We have a leadership that believes the private sector does things better,” said Celia Hagert, senior policy analyst and privatization expert at the Center for Public Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan research group in Austin. “Whether it’s ideology or philosophy—simply believing that people shouldn’t be on these programs in the first place—these things have combined to create a very stingy social safety net system in Texas.”