This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Monday, October 2nd, 2023. I'm Caleb Brown.

Medicaid roles grew rapidly during the pandemic. Now, years unemployment is back to pre-pandemic

levels. The Biden administration has been urging states to slow down the

process of auditing Medicaid for ineligible recipients.

Ray Hetterman is Vice President of Policy at Ohio's Buckeye Institute.

We spoke in August in Chicago.

People are roughly familiar with Medicaid.

Medicaid uptake was... People are roughly familiar with Medicaid.

Medicaid uptake was expanded during the Obamacare

Imbrollio, let's call it. But during the pandemic, we saw the largest ever increase in unemployment

in American history in the shortest time we've ever seen it. But things have been

reasonably good economically since 2020 and but the rules of Medicaid have changed somewhat at least edicts from the federal government to states on how they are able to enroll or remove people from Medicaid.

So walk us through sort of what has changed in Medicaid since the pandemic began and where we are now.

Sure.

In 2020, Caleb, President Trump, you know, signed into law a variety of relief packages

aimed at helping states and people through the pandemic.

And one of those gave states more money to pay for Medicaid.

But in return, states agreed to certain rules that we call a maintenance of effort,

that states would not disenroll people from Medicaid for

reasons that they were making too much money for example. They wouldn't audit people to look and

see if they had other types of health insurance.

So as a consequence, people lost their jobs

...