The Biden administration wants to make sure states are doing all they can to minimize the number of Medicaid enrollees who wind up uninsured once states regain the ability to drop ineligible recipients next month.
The Department of Health and Human Services this week sent governors a letter warning them to adopt measures to curtail coverage losses, which could affect millions of people.
“I urge you to ensure that your state is implementing every possible option to prevent eligible individuals from losing coverage,” HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra wrote in bold in the letter, shared exclusively with CNN.
States risk losing augmented federal Medicaid funding for the rest of this year if they don’t comply with various requirements in their eligibility reviews, Becerra wrote. They must attempt to ensure that they have up-to-date contact information for enrollees and reach out to recipients via multiple methods before dropping coverage based on returned mail. Also, states have to report monthly renewals and terminations, among other metrics.
States have not been able to terminate residents’ Medicaid coverage since the start of the pandemic in exchange for receiving additional federal matching funds. This continuous coverage requirement, which Congress passed as part of a Covid-19 relief package in March 2020, has led Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program enrollment to balloon to more than 91 million people.
All that changes on April 1, when states can once again start disenrolling Medicaid recipients thanks to the federal spending package that Congress passed in December. The enhanced federal match will phase out over the course of the year, relieving states of some of the pressure to winnow their Medicaid rolls quickly.
States have until the end of May 2024 to redetermine enrollees’ eligibility.
A total of roughly…
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