Staying on Medicaid seems tougher than it should be

An Arm and a Leg

Society & Culture, Medicine, Health, Health & Fitness, Documentary

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 23 May 2024

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We take our first look at Medicaid— the big, federally-funded health insurance program for folks with lower incomes— for two reasons:

First, it’s a huge part of our health-care system. Medicaid covers a quarter of all Americans, and four in ten children.

Second, it’s timely: In the last year, more than 20 million people have lost Medicaid — even though there’s evidence to suggest a lot of those people probably still qualify.

More than two-thirds have been dropped for “procedural reasons” — basically, missing paperwork.

Of folks who’ve been dropped, 70 percent have ended up either uninsured, or — in most cases — back on Medicaid.

This is all because of a process called “the unwinding” of COVID-emergency protections that kept folks from getting dropped at all for a few years. It’s been messy.

We’ve been hearing the stories of folks who got dropped, and their fights to get re-enrolled.

In this episode, we hear about two families in Tennessee who lost coverage they were entitled to — including one family who lost their coverage after their mail got sent to a horse pasture — with help from KFF Health News reporter Brett Kelman.

Here’s a transcript of this episode.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey there, you know what we have never talked about on this show? Medicaid, you know, the big
0:05.7	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.
0:25.0	That's 4 out of every 10 kids in this country who are insured by Medicaid. And this is the perfect time to
0:36.9	look at Medicaid because well tens of millions of people are losing their Medicaid coverage like right now.
0:45.0	And it seems like a lot of these people,
0:48.0	well, a lot of them may actually still qualify for Medicaid.
0:52.0	And this is all kind of a back to the future moment,
0:55.0	which started when COVID hit.
0:57.0	At that point, the feds essentially hit pause
1:00.0	on the thing that used to happen every year,
1:02.0	requiring people on Medicaid to re-enroll, to re-establish
1:07.0	whether they were eligible.
1:09.3	And back then, tons of people got dropped every year even though a lot of them probably still
1:15.5	qualified. So the pause lasted through the COVID public health emergency which
1:21.4	ended in spring 2023 and since then
1:24.9	states have been unpauseing doing years and years of
1:29.5	re-enrollments and unenrollments all at once. People call it the unwinding and it's been messy.
1:41.2	Oh and this other thing I've been learning, Medicaid operates really differently
1:45.5	from one state to another and sometimes it even has different names so in
1:49.2	California it's called Medi-Cal in Wisconsin it's Badger Care and so this unwinding can look
1:56.5	completely different from one state to the next. We're going to look mostly
2:00.9	at one state Tennessee where the program is called 10-Care,
	...

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