Opinion by Catherine Rampell: The Great Medicaid Purge begins
In fact, many will become uninsured even if they still legally qualify for Medicaid!still be eligible for Medicaid
. Among children, the share is even higher: 72 percent of children expected to lose their Medicaid or CHIP coverage will technically still be eligible for Medicaid or CHIP.The degree of government failure here should be considered scandalous. To be clear: These people are not losing insurance because their incomes rose, or they aged out of a given program. Rather, they’re losing coverage for pointless bureaucratic reasons. Maybe a letter got sent to the wrong address.
Unfortunately, this red tape is the same reason why lots of eligible families get purged even in a normal, non-end-of-pandemic year. As aberrant as the current “Medicaid unwinding” might appear, it obscures a problem that has long ailed U.S. government programs at virtually all levels: how little federal and state policymakers have done to guarantee access to critical, promised safety-net benefits.
Depending on the state, proving and re-proving eligibility for Medicaid can be somewhere between cumbersome and impossible. In some parts of the country, this is deliberate: Government-hating politicians want fewer poor people to get benefits. Rather than changing eligibility requirements , officials set up an obstacle course and hope some people get tripped up.In other states, public officials truly want everyone eligible for benefits to successfully receive them.
Over the past year, the federal government has been working with states to limit the number of people who will lose coverage when those pandemic-era Medicaid “continuous enrollment”for example, to help people reapply to Medicaid or switch to different forms of coverage. And to some extent, states are trying to auto-renew more Medicaid recipients, by analyzing the internal data sources governments already have handy to confirm someone remains eligible.
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