The Independent Review Entity is overdue

The Independent Review Entity is a separate company under contract with CMS, not part of your plan — so a delay here isn't the plan stalling again, it's a different organization with its own deadline. Most delays are administrative rather than a sign anything is wrong with your case.

Having your case number ready before you call saves time — C2C handles a high volume of cases, and being able to reference yours specifically gets you a real status update instead of a general answer.

Here's what actually moves this forward:

C2C should be able to tell you the status of your case and an expected decision date.

National contacts for this situation:

Whatever brought you to this page is a situation the appeal process already accounts for — it's not a sign the case is broken or that you're starting over. The same level structure, the same rule-based reasoning, and the same deadlines already in motion for your case keep applying.

If you want the full picture of how the appeal levels fit together and where a case like this sits in that sequence, that's covered on its own page.

Families deal with this kind of detour more often than the standard version of the process suggests — the straightforward path from denial to letter to decision is common, but it's far from the only real path a case takes.

Whatever the situation, the next real step is usually a phone call — to the contact listed above, or to your state's free counseling program — not another form to fill out on your own.