BATON ROUGE - State health department officials say they are confident they will receive federal approval for a plan to use data from food stamp applications to qualify people for Medicaid.

The Times-Picayune reports the approach will allow the Department of Health and Hospitals to automatically qualify tens of thousands of people for the state's expansion of Medicaid, the federally funded health care program for the poor.

It will also reduce the workload for DHH and its contractors as they begin signing up as many as 375,000 people over the next several months for the program that's now being branded as "Healthy Louisiana."