Texas Medicaid’s enrollees have gone down since April
Medicaid Loss: Why Do Many People Lose Their Coverage During the Great Unwinding? An Analysis by KFF Director Jennifer Tolbert
Reports from 41 states and the District of Columbia state that at least 3.7 million people have lost Medicaid. And 74% of people, on average, are losing coverage for “paperwork reasons,” says Jennifer Tolbert, director of state health reform at KFF. She explained some of the reasons.
Advocates noticed a problem in the northwest corner of Arkansas, which has a community of people from the Marshall Islands. The state had translated renewal documents, but the wrong message seemed to be getting through, says Keesa Smith, who now works at the nonprofit Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families and formerly worked for the state’s Department of Human Services.
“The documents that DHS had had translated into Marshallese actually came off as being very aggressive,” says Smith, who was speaking at a webinar with the Center for Health Journalism at the University of Southern California. “The one thing that did translate was that these individuals had done something drastically wrong.”
Medicaid is jointly funded by states and the federal government, and each state manages its own program. The Great Unwinding is a variation on how states are handling it.
Medicaid grew by leaps and bounds during the epidemic. Just a few months ago — in March — the number of people on Medicaid was 93 million. That’s about 1 in 4 people in the U.S. on Medicaid, which is the government health program for people with low incomes and for some with disabilities.
State Medicaid Programs are Not Enrolled in 24 Hours Nevertheless: Two States are Winnowing Their Rolls Effectively
They didn’t get the renewal notice in time. They didn’t understand what they had to do. The state did not have the capacity to process the documents before their coverage ended.
That changed in April, and now every state is winnowing its rolls — some much more quickly than others. Texas reported disenrolling 82% of its Medicaid recipients, while Wyoming shed just 8% of its rolls, according to an analysis by KFF, a health policy research organization.
As many as 3.7 million people have lost Medicaid coverage in 41 states and the District of Columbia since the beginning of the Great Unwinding, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis. Around 74% of these people are losing their coverage for “paperwork reasons”, the analysis said. Texas reportedly disenrolling 82% of its Medicaid recipients while Wyoming shed just 8% of its rolls.