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John,
Starting in April, Medicaid programs, which are administered by the states, will be allowed to terminate beneficiaries’ coverage for the first time since February 2020.
This will result in a major civil rights and health equity disaster. According to Health and Human Services (HHS) research, 15 million people will likely lose Medicaid coverage if the program returns to typical pre-pandemic operations.
States can step up and either help people who are still eligible for Medicaid to continue receiving coverage, or direct them to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) Marketplace where they can get premium subsidies to buy private insurance. If the states don’t step up, the most pain will be felt in states like Texas and Florida, which both have some of the highest uninsured rates in the country.
We cannot have another health equity disaster on our hands. Send a direct message to Governors Greg Abbott (TX) and Ron DeSantis (FL), demanding they expand Medicaid coverage and help their residents stay on Medicaid or access affordable health care through the ACA Marketplace.
Once Medicaid terminations resume, the majority of those projected to lose coverage will be people of color, including 4.6 million Latinos, 2.2 million African Americans, and nearly a million Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.
BIPOC communities make up 62.4% of the population of Texas and 1 out of 5 Texans was uninsured in 2021, giving Texas the unofficial title of, “the most uninsured state in the country.”1,2 Florida and Texas make up 2 of the 5 states with the highest uninsured rates and it’s all because they didn’t expand Medicaid eligibility under the Affordable Care Act.
We don’t have to look far to see what a difference Medicaid expansion made in the health circumstances in people's lives; we can see it in Texarkana, Arkansas and Texarkana, Texas.3 Texarkana is a small community that is split along the Arkansas-Texas border, and while it’s technically two separate cities in two separate states, it sometimes functions as one city. Arkansas expanded Medicaid under the ACA, while Texas did not. The result is that thousands of poor and low-income people are left out of receiving not only Medicaid coverage, but access to other government programs all because they’re unable to move just a few blocks away across the state border.4
Access to health care is an inalienable right. Not only should Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis opt-in to Medicaid expansion in their states, but they also need to create functioning call centers where people can get their questions answered and can submit information by phone if they lack internet access. Of special importance, states should utilize information they may already have about beneficiaries to establish their continuing eligibility instead of requiring more documentation.
If states do not take these critical steps, there will be a large number of people who will lose benefits even though they are still eligible. An estimated 5.3 million of those people will be children, ¾ of whom will remain eligible, but be terminated for administrative reasons. We’ve seen this for years -- before 2020 in Texas, 50,000 children were being kicked off Medicaid annually because their parents weren’t able to complete the paperwork on time.5
Send a direct message to Governors Abbott and DeSantis and tell them to expand Medicaid coverage now and to protect current beneficiaries from losing their health coverage!
Thank you for all you do to support vulnerable communities,
Deborah Weinstein
Executive Director, Coalition on Human Needs
1 https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/TX
2 https://www.keranews.org/news/2022-09-16/texas-leads-the-country-in-the-percentage-of-uninsured-people
3 https://www.arkansas.com/texarkana
4 https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/09/business/economy/uninsured-on-the-wrong-side-of-a-state-line.html
5 https://www.expressnews.com/news/politics/texas_legislature/article/Texas-kicks-thousands-of-low-income-children-off-13727929.php
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