Eligibility checks for Medicaid were paused during the pandemic. Many people are still losing coverage in the bureaucratic jumble that has ensued since they resumed.
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Ordinarily, people enrolled in Medicaid — government-provided health insurance for people with low incomes or disabilities — go through eligibility checks every year to determine whether they can renew coverage. But in March 2020, the federal government froze the checks as part of its public health emergency. So people were continuously enrolled in Medicaid, and no one was dropped for three years.
That stopped when President Joe Biden ended the emergency in the spring. Many months later, Medicaid enrollees across the country are still getting letters like Olenski’s as part of the “unwinding” process, which is scheduled to continue through May. After that, the pre-pandemic status quo resumes.
As of Dec. 20, at least 13 million people had been disenrolled from Medicaid in 2023, according to an analysis by KFF, a nonprofit group focused on health policy. Net enrollment in the program (given that some people were newly enrolled or have re-enrolled) has dropped by around 7.8 million, according to an analysis by the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families.
Texas treats being the dumbest state in the US as a serious trophy that it aggressively defends by constantly shooting itself in the foot and screaming to the rest of the country “hah, SEE WE SHOWED THOSE POOR PEOPLE WHO IS BOSS”.
The other states always feel really awkward and kind of traumatized by seeing Texas repeatedly empty a firearm into their foot while screaming at…themselves? but whenever another state offers to drive them to the hospital Texas spits in their face and starts screaming even louder about how they don’t need handouts… which usually culminates in them emptying another magazine of rounds into their foot to put a pin on the point. Eventually they mercifully pass out from the pain and Connecticut takes them in the back of their Camry and just never says a word about it and Texas usually has lost enough blood by that point that it doesn’t remember.