Medicaid covers a million fewer children — baby Elijah was one of them
HOUSTON — The baby’s lips were turning blue from lack of oxygen in the blood when his mother, Kristin Johnson, rushed him to an emergency room here last month. Only after he was admitted to intensive care with a respiratory virus did Johnson learn that he had been dropped from Medicaid coverage.
Some state and federal officials have portrayed the drop — 3% of enrolled children — as a success story, arguing that more Americans are getting coverage from employers in an improving economy. But there is growing evidence that administrative changes aimed at fighting fraud and waste — and rising fears of deportation in immigrant communities — are pushing large numbers of children out of the programs, and that many of them are now going without coverage.
“Unemployment remains low, wage growth is up, & we now see fewer people relying on public assistance,” Seema Verma, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, wrote on Twitter in April. “That’s something to celebrate.” In Texas, the number of uninsured children rose by around 120,000 between 2016 and 2018. State officials increased paperwork requirements in 2014 for families covered under both Medicaid and CHIP, which serves children whose income is slightly higher than Medicaid’s.
“The way they are doing this seems clearly designed to throw people off this program,” said Eliot Fishman, a senior director at the consumer group Families USA, who was a top Medicaid official in the Obama administration. The changes helped the uninsured rate among children reach its lowest level ever in 2016, with fewer than 5% without coverage.
History has shown that when states require more paperwork from Medicaid beneficiaries, more eligible people fall through the cracks. Medicaid beneficiaries tend to move often; to have unstable hours and incomes; and to have literacy challenges that can make it hard to submit detailed renewal packages or verify their incomes frequently.
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