Millions set to lose Medicaid coverage as pandemic-era rule expires
Source: NBC News
A pandemic-era rule that protected people from losing their Medicaid coverage will expire Friday, putting millions of peoples’ health insurance coverage at risk. edicaid provides free health insurance to people with low incomes. Usually, Medicaid recipients need to renew their coverage every year, and if they are no longer eligible, they lose their coverage.
But lawmakers passed a rule in 2020 that kept people automatically enrolled in the government program, even if they no longer met the requirements for coverage. That protection will end Friday at midnight, leaving up to 15 million people at risk of losing their health insurance, according to an estimate from KFF, a nonprofit research organization formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation. Some 95 million people in the U.S. are currently enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP, which provides low-cost coverage to children, according to KFF.
Even a small gap in coverage can be “devastating,” said Jennifer Tolbert, the associate director for the program on Medicaid and the uninsured at KFF. Some may not be able to get access to their monthly medications, she said, while others may not get access to treatment for their chronic physical or mental health conditions.
The people most likely to be affected by the change are “children, young adults, Black and Hispanic or Latinx people,” according to Carrie Fry, a health policy professor at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee. “In sum, this is an all-hands-on-deck situation to minimize the number of people who lose Medicaid coverage,” Fry said.
Read more: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/millions-set-lose-medicaid-coverage-pandemic-era-rule-expires-rcna77234
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