Last week saw a win and a loss for health care. North Carolina became the 40th state to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. That’s a big victory for the estimated 600,000 low-income adults in North Carolina who will now be eligible for government insurance and join the millions of eligible adults in other Medicaid expansion states.
As for the defeat, a federal program expired that had kept Americans on Medicaid during the pandemic, regardless of changes in their circumstances that would have normally made them lose their insurance. The practice, referred to as continuous enrollment, was a key driver of the two percentage point decline in the fraction of people without health insurance since the pandemic began.
Now continuous enrollment is gone, and according to the Department of Health & Human Services some 15 million out of the 87 million adults on the program will likely lose their Medicaid insurance in the coming months, reversing some of the recent progress on reducing the uninsured rate. Not only that, but almost 7 million of them will lose Medicaid coverage even though are likely to still be eligible simply because of administrative problems, which are common in the program and are often due to difficulties contacting beneficiaries.
