More than 17 million Americans lost their Medicaid coverage in the past year, cutting them off from the government program that helps to cover medical costs for people already living on limited incomes.The pandemic expansion of Medicaid has ended, with states required to unwind the expansion by May 2024.
Each state was free to approach the “unwinding” however they chose. The impact has been massive: More than a third of all people who were receiving benefits from those programs as of March 2023 have been disenrolled through this “unwinding” nationwide. The financial destabilization of that drastic drop in government support for low-income households fell disproportionately on people of color, a recent study found.
Black patients were over 10% more likely than White patients to be disenrolled, Hispanic patients nearly 20% more likely, while Native American and Alaskan Natives were more than twice as likely to lose coverage. The vast majority of Medicaid disenrollments have been marked “procedural reasons,” accortding to a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation. A procedural disenrollment means that nobody actually figured out those enrollees should be kicked off Medicaid – they just didn’t get required paperwork from those households and summarily removed them from the program.
See “Loss Of Medicaid Coverage Disproportionately Impacted People Of Color” by Devin Thompson on the National Community Reinvestment Coalition website (March 19, 2024)
