The coming Medicaid disaster

Lever -   As states have begun clearing out their Medicaid rolls for the first time since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly three quarters of the Americans who’ve lost coverage have been terminated not because they’re ineligible for the low-income health insurance program, but due to administrative reasons, such as failing to quickly respond to a piece of mail....

The measure, passed as part of a year-end spending bill, allowed states to begin mass disenrollments starting in April — a policy decision that is naturally a boon for government contractors that states pay to identify beneficiaries they could potentially remove from the program. Now that states have resumed annual Medicaid eligibility reviews, an estimated 17 million people, and potentially up to 24 million, could lose Medicaid coverage. According to early data from the Kaiser Family Foundation, more than 1.5 million Americans have already lost coverage, and 1.1 million have lost their health insurance for arbitrary reasons, not because they aren’t eligible.