Post-COVID Reviews, Paperwork and Human Errors Drive Medicaid Enrollment Cuts

The notice arrived in an envelope stamped “important information,” telling Kristin Fortner she needed to prove that she and her husband still deserved Medicaid. She filled out the form within a week of receiving it this past winter and mailed it back. So she was perplexed by a phone call almost three months later from the Arkansas Department of Human Services alerting her that she had neglected to renew the couple’s Medicaid and, unless she sent the paperwork, their health insurance would end.

Fortner quickly resubmitted the same form, this time in person. Except Arkansas already had cut them off. She is among nearly 4 million Americans who have been lopped off Medicaid since the end of a pandemic-era promise that people with the safety-net health coverage could keep it, requiring every state to begin a herculean undertaking of sorting out who still belonged on the rolls. The 3.8 million is an undercount, reflecting only people who have lost coverage so far in 37 states that have voluntarily made public their data from this sorting process, known as the Medicaid unwinding.

Most of those people have been dropped from Medicaid for reasons unrelated to whether they actually are eligible for the coverage. Three-fourths have been removed because of bureaucratic factors, according to the compilation by KFF, a health-policy organization. Such “procedural” cutoffs — prompted by renewal notices not arriving at the right addresses, beneficiaries not understanding the notices, or an assortment of state agencies’ mistakes and logjams — were a peril against which federal health officials had cautioned for many months as they coached states in advance on how best to carry out the unwinding.

Fortner’s experience attests to the bureaucratic maze ensnaring some people — and the damage being done to their well-being. The Arkansas Medicaid agency, one of the nation’s first to launch the unwinding, has repeatedly insisted that Fortner needs to provide different documents. Her husband, Ryan, has stopped making physical therapy appointments for a herniated disk. Fortner felt like she was going through withdrawal when she skipped Suboxone, a medication that helps her stay off opioids, for two weeks, and now, after paying for a partial order with a drug discount card, stretches the supply by cutting the pills in half.

Beneficiaries typically must renew Medicaid every year, but that stopped in 2020 when the coronavirus arrived. With no one leaving the program, the number of Americans on Medicaid swelled to 85 million by this April, when the unwinding began in phases with five states starting to terminate people. By July, every state except one had started removing some people from the program. Oregon will begin removing people in the fall. The government wants states to spread the undertaking over a year, although a few have chosen to do it faster — none more rapidly than Arkansas.