["Pausing disenrollment was a tremendous act of social welfare;
restarting it is criminal," tweeted a single-payer advocate who helps
people enroll in Medicaid.]
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‘A TRUE SCANDAL, AND SHOULD BE COVERED AS SUCH’: OUTRAGE OVER
MEDICAID PURGE GROWS  
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Jake Johnson
June 20, 2023
Common Dreams
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_ "Pausing disenrollment was a tremendous act of social welfare;
restarting it is criminal," tweeted a single-payer advocate who helps
people enroll in Medicaid. _

A doctor conducts a routine exam on July 28, 2020., Paul
Bersebach/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images

 

Advocates, policy experts, and lawmakers are growing increasingly
outraged as data and anecdotes emerging from states across the U.S.
indicate that hundreds of thousands of people—including children and
seniors—are being thrown off Medicaid for failing to submit
paperwork on time and other bureaucratic reasons.

State figures obtained
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by the _Associated Press_ show that at least 1.5 million people in
roughly two dozen states have been removed from Medicaid since April,
when state governments were given a green light
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by Congress and the Biden administration to resume eligibility checks
that were halted during the coronavirus pandemic.

"Pausing disenrollment was a tremendous act of social welfare;
restarting it is criminal," tweeted
[[link removed]] Timothy Faust,
a single-payer advocate who helps people enroll in Medicaid.

"You have no idea how complicated it is to get an application together
and how arbitrary the decisionmaking feels," Faust wrote Monday.

Eligibility checks come with paperwork and other requirements
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often confusing and difficult to navigate. The process is made even
more difficult by the failure of some states
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sufficiently inform Medicaid enrollees about the resumption of
eligibility checks and the steps they must follow to keep their
coverage.

As a result, a staggering number of people have lost coverage in
recent months, with the impact heavily concentrated in a handful of
states
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Republican-led Florida has kicked around 250,000 people off Medicaid
since March. In more than half of those cases, people were removed for
procedural reasons, not because they were deemed ineligible for the
program due to income or other factors.

Elliot Haspel, an author and policy expert, lamented the lack of
national media coverage of the Medicaid purge given the devastating
consequences for vulnerable people who are losing coverage.

Local media outlets in Florida and elsewhere have elevated stories of
individuals who have lost coverage due to red tape, including an
87-year-old
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woman who relies on the program for her home health aide and a
seven-year-old child
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with leukemia.

"The ratio of impact to real people's lives to media coverage on this
Medicaid red tape story is one of the most skewed in recent memory,"
Haspel wrote Monday. "This is a true scandal, and should be covered as
such."

Some people have reported having their health coverage thrown into
chaos by government errors, a common occurrence as understaffed
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state Medicaid systems work to redetermine eligibility for millions of
residents.

The _Associated Press_ on Monday highlighted
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the story of 28-year-old Jennifer Mojica, who "was told in April that
she no longer qualified for Medicaid because Arkansas had incorrectly
determined her income was above the limit."

"She got that resolved, but was then told her five-year-old son was
being dropped from Medicaid because she had requested his
cancellation—something that never happened, she said," the outlet
reported. "Her son's coverage has been restored, but now Mojica says
she's been told her husband no longer qualifies."

Arkansas, led by Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, has removed
around 110,000 people from Medicaid since April, according to
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data compiled by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF).

Sanders has openly celebrated
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the speed with which Arkansas is stripping residents of coverage. The
federal government has given states a little over a year to complete
Medicaid eligibility checks, and Arkansas is working to complete the
process in six months—the fastest pace in the nation.

The U.S. Health and Human Services Department, which is facing growing
calls to intervene
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states leave hundreds of thousands without coverage, has estimated
that 15 million people
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could be removed from Medicaid by the time states are done with their
eligibility checks.

In addition to the red-tape disenrollments, some people have been
removed from Medicaid because their incomes are now too high to
qualify for the program—meaning they'll have to seek coverage
elsewhere, such as the Affordable Care Act (ACA) exchanges. Income
limits for Medicaid are particularly strict in the ten Republican-led
states that have opted against
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expanding Medicaid under the ACA.

As _The Washington Post_'s Amy Goldstein recently warned
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"Because those states tend to make only the extremely poor eligible
for Medicaid, they will have many people who make too much to qualify
for the government health insurance but not enough to reach the income
needed to get federal subsidies to afford health plans sold on ACA
marketplaces."

A KFF survey
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released last month showed that more than 40% of people with Medicaid
as their only source of health coverage say they "wouldn’t know
where to look for other coverage or would be uninsured" if they were
kicked off the program.

"If we had Medicare for All," said
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Khanna [[link removed]] (D-Calif.), "this
wouldn't be a problem."

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Jake Johnson is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel
free to republish and share widely.

* Medicaid Disenrollment;
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