Medicaid disenrollments for 20 million added during Covid could take states at least a year after omnibus provision, CMS guidance
20 Million Americans Could Lose Medicaid Due To New Bill Provision
Robert Romano with The Daily Torch reports:
Changes to federal law in the $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill will end the Medicaid “continuous enrollment” provision passed by veto-proof margins in 2020 in the Families First Coronavirus Response Act that prohibited states from disenrolling Medicaid patients even when they no longer qualified during the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) public health emergency which began in March 2020.
As a result of the 2020 changes to law and regulations, Medicaid enrollment skyrocketed by 20.2 million to more than 91 million since Feb. 2020, according to the latest data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) compiled by the Kaiser Family Foundation, as 25 million jobs were temporarily lost and unemployment claims soared. The mechanism for the expansion appears to have been automatic enrollment when patients showed up to the hospital and other medical services without insurance during the pandemic.
It was Medicaid expansion larger than that even achieved under Obamacare during the entire period of expanded enrollment from 2010 through all of 2019, when the number went from 56 million before the Affordable Care Act was passed, to 71 million in 2019. It had reached 75 million in 2016, but continued decreases of the unemployment rate during the Trump years drove down the means-tested eligibility of the program before the steep Covid recession.
Now, with the public health emergency ending on May 11 and under Section 5131 of Subtitle D of the $1.7 trillion omnibus, after March 31 of this year, states are finally allowed to resume verifying income of recipients resulting in redeterminations of eligibility as increased federal spending for Medicaid is phased out.
