Millions at risk of losing Medicaid

Confusion mounts as states begin required eligibility review for 84M recipients

WASHINGTON — Days out from a surgery and with a young son undergoing chemotherapy, Kyle McHenry was scrambling to figure out if his Florida family will still be covered by Medicaid come Monday.

One form on the state’s website said coverage for their sick 5-year-old son, Ryder, had been denied. But another said the family would remain on Medicaid through next year. And a letter from the state said McHenry now makes too much money for him, his wife and their older son to qualify after the end of the month.

Three phone calls and a total of six frustrating hours on hold Thursday with Florida’s Department of Children and Families later, the McHenrys finally got the answer they were dreading: Most of the family is losing Medicaid coverage, although Ryder remains eligible because of his illness.

“I’m trying not to go into panic,” McHenry’s wife, Allie McHenry, told The Associated Press earlier in the week. The state agency did not respond to AP’s request for comment.

The McHenrys are among the first casualties in an unprecedented nationwide review of the 84 million Medicaid enrollees over the next year that will require states to remove people whose incomes are now too high for the federal-state program offered to the poorest Americans.

Millions are expected to be left without insurance after getting a reprieve for the past three years during the coronavirus pandemic, when the federal government barred states from removing anyone who was deemed ineligible.

Advocacy groups have warned for months that confusion and errors will abound throughout the undertaking, wrongly leaving some of the country’s poorest people suddenly without health insurance and unable to pay for necessary medical care.

Medicaid enrollees are already reporting they’ve been erroneously kicked off in a handful of states that have begun removing people, including Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, New Hampshire and South Dakota, according to data gathered by the AP.

Trevor Hawkins is seeing the problems play out firsthand in Arkansas, where officials said the state is moving “as fast as possible” to wrap up a review before year’s end.

Hawkins spends his days driving winding roads across the state providing free legal services to people who have lost coverage or need help filling out pages of forms the state has mailed to them. In between his drives, he fields about a half-dozen phone calls daily from people seeking guidance on their Medicaid applications.

“The notices are so confusing,” said Hawkins, who works for Legal Aid of Arkansas. “No two people have had the same experience with losing their coverage. It’s hard to identify what’s really the issue.”

Some people have been mailed pre-populated application forms that include inaccurate income or household information but leave Medicaid enrollees no space to fix the state’s errors. Others have received documents that say Medicaid recipients will lose their coverage before they’ve even had an opportunity to reapply, Hawkins said. A spokesman for Arkansas’ Department of Human Services said the forms instruct enrollees to fill in their information.