Hey there, you know what we have never talked about on this show? Medicaid, you know, the big

federally funded health insurance program for folks with lower incomes. And I did not realize that has been a huge omission because it turns out Medicaid covers a ton of people like about a quarter of all Americans and about 40% of all children.

That's 4 out of every 10 kids in this country who are insured by Medicaid. And this is the perfect time to

look at Medicaid because well tens of millions of people are losing their Medicaid coverage like right now.

And it seems like a lot of these people,

well, a lot of them may actually still qualify for Medicaid.

And this is all kind of a back to the future moment,

which started when COVID hit.

At that point, the feds essentially hit pause

on the thing that used to happen every year,

requiring people on Medicaid to re-enroll, to re-establish

whether they were eligible.

And back then, tons of people got dropped every year even though a lot of them probably still

qualified. So the pause lasted through the COVID public health emergency which

ended in spring 2023 and since then

states have been unpauseing doing years and years of

re-enrollments and unenrollments all at once. People call it the unwinding and it's been messy.

Oh and this other thing I've been learning, Medicaid operates really differently

from one state to another and sometimes it even has different names so in

California it's called Medi-Cal in Wisconsin it's Badger Care and so this unwinding can look

completely different from one state to the next. We're going to look mostly

at one state Tennessee where the program is called 10-Care,

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