Aneka French applied for Medicaid in October, not long after Missouri became the 38th state to expand eligibility for the program.
But her application sat for months in a backlog with tens of thousands of others. While she waited, French, 45, an uninsured medical technician from St. Louis, paid out-of-pocket when she was treated at a health clinic for a knee injury last fall.
For nearly a decade, Missouri’s Republican political leaders resisted expanding eligibility for Medicaid, the state-federal health insurance program for people with low incomes. It took effect in summer 2021 after a voter ballot initiative passed in 2020. Now, Missouri has more pending applications for MO HealthNet — the name of the state’s Medicaid program — than people enrolled through the expansion. While 64,210 people have been approved as part of the expansion, nearly 73,000 applications were pending as of early February.
