Pandemic Protections Expiring: Millions Enrolled in Medicaid at Risk of Losing Coverage

Kialah Marshall’s office is the size of a closet and has no windows. There, she keeps an Excel spreadsheet with the prosaic title “Medicaid Unwinding.” This spreadsheet is the raw material for a mind-numbing routine.

Swope Health is a network of health clinics that is supported by the federal government. Five days a week, she and a group of coworkers in a disadvantaged neighbourhood of Kansas City, Missouri’s biggest city, phone between 75 and 100 Medicaid clients from a list of around 19,000 people who are on the list. Their mission is uncomplicated: inform those individuals that they run the risk of losing their health insurance for the first time in at least three years.A clause that was included in a coronavirus relief package that was approved by Congress in 2020 banned state authorities from removing individuals from Medicaid who no longer qualified for the programme. However, beginning on Saturday, state officials throughout the nation were able to begin the process of doing so.

This package provided states more federal funds in return for assuring that beneficiaries of Medicaid, a joint federal-state programme that serves people with low incomes, would have their health coverage throughout the epidemic. Medicaid is a programme that helps low-income individuals. The percentage of uninsured people in the country hit a record low at the beginning of the previous year, in part due of that programme.

This is an increase from the approximately 70 million people who were covered by these programmes when the epidemic first began. Patients were granted an unprecedented respite in the form of guaranteed coverage, which preserved insurance for millions of vulnerable Americans and spared them the inconvenience of monthly eligibility checks.

According to projections made by the federal government, around 15 million individuals will lose health insurance coverage in the months ahead. Of this number, roughly seven million people are anticipated to be removed from the rolls despite the fact that they continue to meet the requirements for participation. According to estimations made by the federal government, over half of individuals who lose coverage will be of Black or Hispanic descent.

The modifications to eligibility might result in an increase in the number of people signing up for private coverage via the marketplaces established by the Affordable Care Act. This is because some individuals who lose their Medicaid coverage will become eligible for free insurance.

However, in states that have not expanded Medicaid in accordance with the Affordable Care Act, hundreds of thousands of individuals might wind up falling into the so-called coverage gap. These people have incomes that are too low to qualify for subsidised coverage via those markets, but their earnings are too high to qualify for Medicaid.

The “unwinding,” as Ms. Marshall and state and federal health authorities are calling it, will proceed at varying speeds and include different mechanisms in each jurisdiction. The vast majority of them anticipate that it will take between 12 and 14 months to do the eligibility verifications, and many of them intend to start removing individuals from the Medicaid rolls by the end of spring or the beginning of summer. According to the information provided by the federal government, just five states, namely Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, New Hampshire, and South Dakota, were anticipated to start removing individuals from Medicaid coverage this month.

Annual eligibility checks have the potential to save states money by freeing their Medicaid programmes of the financial burden of providing coverage to people who are no longer eligible for it. However, this often results in a loop that health policy experts refer to as “churn,” which is when individuals who are qualified for Medicaid lose their insurance due to the complicated and daunting bureaucracy involved in the enrollment verification process, only to ultimately re-enroll.

When legislators established that deadline, they also attached guardrails in order to encourage states to begin the work in stages. The Act requires that statistics about the number of individuals who have been removed from Medicaid be sent by the state to the Department of Health and Human Services on a monthly basis. It also gives the department the authority to step in if a state is not complying with rules set by the federal government.

It is particularly important for Medicaid beneficiaries to be warned about the policy change that is being unwound, and clinics like as Swope Health are especially important in this regard since their physicians and other health professionals frequently know individuals who will be impacted by the policy change. Tamika Reliford, one of Ms. Marshall’s co-workers who assists patients with their coverage, said that Swope has broadcast advertisements on the radio and erected billboards in and around the Kansas City area. As a result, the number of calls from Medicaid beneficiaries wondering about how to maintain their insurance coverage has grown.

During the epidemic, the state of Missouri extended its Medicaid programme in accordance with the provisions of the Affordable Care Act. Mr. Smith was one of the hundreds of thousands of individuals who were able to get coverage as a result of this expansion. However, similar to others who obtained coverage in the same manner, he will soon be subjected to the yearly review that is required to determine his eligibility.

Ms. Marshall, an employee of Swope who was going through the Medicaid spreadsheet, expressed concern that she would cause patients to enter a state of “frantic panic” when she reaches out to them to warn them about the prospect of losing coverage. She remarked, “This is something that a person needs for their family, for their children.” “This is something that a person needs.”