According to KFF, a health-policy nonprofit that has been accumulating this data, the majority of those people have been removed from Medicaid for reasons unrelated to whether they are genuinely eligible for the coverage.
Federal health officials had warned states about this risk for months as they advised them on how to best carry out the unwinding.
Challenges in Medicaid Renewal Process
Such procedural cutoffs were caused by renewal notices not arriving at the correct addresses, beneficiaries not understanding the notices, or a variety of state agency errors and bottlenecks.
The nation’s largest public insurance program, Medicaid, was created as a result of the War on Poverty in the 1960s.
The majority of the funding comes from the federal government, which also establishes the fundamental laws and regulates the states, which determine who is eligible and manage applications and renewals.
By this April, when the unwinding started in stages and five states started terminating people, there were 85 million Americans enrolled in Medicaid, despite no one exiting the program. By July, all states but one had begun to terminate some participants from the program.
In the fall, Oregon will start removing people. Although the government prefers that states spread out the project over a year, some have opted to move more quickly than others, none more so than Arkansas.
Read more: New Chick-Fil-A Restaurants Coming To Atlanta And NYC
Health Policy Advocates Call for Federal Intervention
Xavier Becerra, secretary of health and human services, has expressed his displeasure with the high rate at which low-income individuals are cut off from Medicaid without knowing if they still qualify.
Democrats on Capitol Hill and other proponents of health policy argue that HHS is partially to blame, arguing that federal health authorities should be more aggressive with states that have been underperforming.
In the early months of the unwinding, CMS declined to say how many states were breaking federal regulations and how frequently federal officials were stepping in.
Read more: PlayStation Plus August 2023: Essential Free Games Revealed