The Biden administration is slow to act as millions are booted off Medicaid, advocates say
WASHINGTON (AP) — Up to 30 million of the poorest Americans could be purged from the Medicaid program, many the result of error-ridden state reviews that poverty experts say the Biden administration is not doing enough to stop.
The projections from the health consulting firm Avalere come as states undertake a sweeping reevaluation of the 94 million people enrolled in Medicaid, government’s health insurance for the neediest Americans. A host of problems have surfaced across the country, including hourslong phone wait times in Florida, confusing government forms in Arkansas, and children wrongly dropped from coverage in Texas.
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“Those people were destined to fail,” said Trevor Hawkins, an attorney for Legal Aid of Arkansas.
Hawkins helped hundreds of people navigate their Medicaid eligibility in Arkansas, as state officials worked to “swiftly disenroll” about 420,000 people in six months’ time. He raised problems with Arkansas’ process — like forms that wrongly told people they needed to reapply for Medicaid, instead of simply renew it — with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Nothing changed, he said.
“They ask questions but they don’t tell us what is going on,” Hawkins said of CMS. “Those should be major red flags. If there was a situation where CMS was to step in, it would have been Arkansas.”
Nearly a dozen advocates around the country detailed widespread problems they’ve encountered while helping some of the estimated 10 million people who’ve already been dropped from Medicaid. Some fear systemic problems are being ignored.
In a statement Tuesday, the Health and Human Services Department said it is monitoring states like Texas, Florida and Arkansas, which account for a quarter of the country’s Medicaid disenrollments.
“These and other states need to do more to protect coverage,” HHS said in an email. “We have put all states on notice and will not be afraid to take enforcement action.”
Congress ended a COVID-19 policy last year that barred states from kicking anyone off Medicaid during the pandemic, requiring them to undertake a review of every enrollee’s eligibility over the next year. But the Democratic-led Congress also gave HHS Xavier Becerra the power to fine states or halt disenrollments if people were improperly being removed.
HHS has shared little about problems it has uncovered.
Earlier this year, the agency briefly paused disenrollments in 14 states, but it did not disclose which states were paused or for what reasons.
In August, HHS announced thousands of children had been wrongly removed in 29 states that were automatically removing entire households, instead of individuals, from coverage.
