The federal government’s temporary expansion of Medicaid during the pandemic helped millions of Floridians weather the public health crisis. With that coverage ending, Florida needs to carefully draw down the rolls, ensuring that those eligible continue to receive uninterrupted care, that health providers don’t suffer financial shock and that community safety nets remain intact. It’s another reminder of how Florida loses by refusing to follow the lead of many other Republican-led states in permanently expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.
Congress passed a coronavirus relief package in 2020 that offered states additional federal funding in exchange for guaranteeing that recipients of Medicaid, a joint federal-state program for low-income people, would retain their health coverage. The measure was intended to ensure low-income families could afford medical treatment during the public health emergency. Tens of millions of Americans were spared nationwide; enrollment in Florida’s Medicaid program ballooned by 1.7 million people.
But the expiration of the public health emergency last week means that states have about 14 months to disenroll those who no longer qualify. Federal officials have estimated that about 15 million people will lose coverage, including nearly 7 million people who are expected to be dropped even though they still qualify. In Florida, as the Tampa Bay Times reported last week, close to a million residents could be thrown off the program over the coming year. The Florida Department of Children and Families plans to review the eligibility of almost 5 million recipients. It has already identified around 900,000 recipients it said were no longer eligible, while another 850,000 recipients had not responded to requests from the state for details about their income.
This massive shedding of coverage will hurt families, employers, health care providers and the well-being of communities across the state. Recipients need to stay tuned, keep their contact information up to date, and be prepared to complete their renewals. The Department of Children and Families will need to ramp up staffing if the extra call center agents already planned cannot keep pace with the surge in calls from anxious clients. The department will also need to expand its outreach; many people over a three-year period will have changed their names, addresses and phone numbers. They deserve to be treated as humans and residents, not mere numbers.
The state needs to work in tandem with nonprofits and health care providers to help those no longer qualified for Medicaid to find coverage they can afford. Local nonprofits and health care agencies fear the purge will cause an unprecedented wave of hundreds of thousands of Floridians losing coverage, causing the state’s uninsured rate to rocket and leaving many residents, including children, with no access to medical care. More than 7% of Florida children, roughly 332,000, were uninsured in 2021, ranking the state in the bottom 10 nationally, according to a study by the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families.
Florida is one of 10 states that have refused to take advantage of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, cementing its place as an outlier even as other Republican-run states have reversed years of opposition to expanding the program. An estimated 900,000 more Floridians would be eligible for Medicaid under the act, which is often referred to as Obamacare. The expansion would provide the state billions of dollars in federally subsidized savings and incentives. While state lawmakers are pushing to spend more this year on care for low-income families, the measures fall far short of what’s needed or what Medicaid expansion could provide.
This political opposition to Obamacare is bad for Floridians and costly to taxpayers. It also raises the stakes for administering this purge in Medicaid as responsibly as possible.
____
Editorials are the institutional voice of the Tampa Bay Times. The members of the Editorial Board are Editor of Editorials Graham Brink, Sherri Day, Sebastian Dortch, John Hill, Jim Verhulst and Chairman and CEO Conan Gallaty. Follow @TBTimes_Opinion on Twitter for more opinion news.
____
