News Briefs: 1.5M Medicaid Enrollees Lose Coverage
As of June 27, at least 1.5 million Medicaid enrollees had lost coverage since eligibility redeterminations started back up, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) Medicaid Enrollment and Unwinding Tracker. States have been permitted to restart the process of disenrolling Medicaid beneficiaries since April 1; before that, they were barred from conducting routine eligibility checks and purging their rolls as a condition of receiving enhanced federal matching funds during the COVID-19 public health emergency. KFF noted that there is “wide variation” across the 26 states (plus the District of Columbia) reporting data, with a disenrollment rate as low as 16% in Virginia and as high as 81% in South Carolina. Overall, 73% of people kicked off Medicaid so far in the reporting states have lost coverage due to procedural reasons — like not completing their coverage-renewal paperwork — rather than being deemed ineligible.
