During the COVID public health emergency, the Medicaid program was required to keep current recipients on the rolls without reverifying their eligibility. Starting this month, states will begin the process of reverifying recipients, which the Department of Health and Human Services projects will lead to around 15 million people losing their healthcare coverage over the next year. One in three of those people will be children. Two thirds will be Black or Latinx. Even more shocking, according to the federal government’s own estimates, at least 6.8 million of those people who will be kicked out of Medicaid this year will still be eligible for the program but will lose their coverage anyway just because of administrative errors and delays. COVID cases may be declining, but we still have a public health emergency on our hands in this country – the pandemic just exposed and exacerbated the healthcare crisis that already existed. For decades, Americans have struggled every day to afford the care they need or gone without care altogether. Three years of illness, job loss, and economic turmoil have only made those problems
worse. Until we have a Medicare for All system that guarantees healthcare as a human right, we need to do everything we can to preserve the safety nets we do have in place, and taking away basic healthcare from millions of low-income or disabled Americans will put them at risk of sickness and preventable death. The end of the Medicaid continuous enrollment policy presents a clear and present danger to our families, our communities, and our country as a whole. We call on President Biden to take immediate executive action to halt the purging of the Medicaid roles and ensure continued access to care for the 15 million people in jeopardy of having it taken away from them! |
