In the month of April, Texas Medicaid has dropped over 85% of its enrollees

Medicaid Loss and Its Implications for the Great Unwinding: An Attorney General’s Report from the State Office of Health Reform

At least 3.7 million people have lost Medicaid, according to reports from 41 states and the District of Columbia, KFF reports. The director of state health reform at KFF says that on average, 74% of people are losing coverage due to paperwork. She describes some of the reasons.

In Arkansas, for instance, advocates noticed a problem in the northwest corner of the state with a community of people who are from the Marshall Islands originally. The state translated renewal documents, but the wrong message was getting through, according to a person who once worked for the state’s Department of Human Services.

“The documents that DHS had had translated into Marshallese actually came off as being very aggressive,” says Smith, who was speaking at a webinar with the Center for Health Journalism at the University of Southern California. “The one thing that did translate was that these individuals had done something drastically wrong.”

Medicaid is jointly funded by states and the federal government, and each state manages its own program. That’s the reason for the large variation in how states are handling the Great Unwinding.

During the pandemic, Medicaid grew rapidly. The number of people on Medicaid was 93 million a few months ago. About 1 in 4 people in the U.S. have Medicaid, the government health program for low income people.

The Effect of Medicaid Annihilation on Health Policies in the Early Stages of Disagreement: State vs. State

“They didn’t get the renewal notice in time. They didn’t understand what they needed to do,” says Tolbert. “Or they submitted the documents, but the state was unable to process those documents before their coverage was ended.”

Since the change in April, every state is winningnowing its rolls. Texas reported disenrolling 82% of its Medicaid recipients, while Wyoming shed just 8% of its rolls, according to an analysis by KFF, a health policy research organization.