The Biden administration is calling on state officials to slow down reviews of their Medicaid programs that have already reduced enrollment by more than 1 million nationwide and will likely reduce it by several million more in the months to come.
The worry is that many of the people losing Medicaid still qualify under the program’s guidelines, are struggling with cumbersome paperwork requirements and will end up uninsured — although nobody knows for sure how many of the people losing coverage fall into that category or what will happen to each of them as a result.
All of this is happening because of a pandemic-era policy that is expiring.
Under the terms of COVID-19 relief legislation that Congress passed and former President Donald Trump signed in early 2020, the federal government offered states extra money to administer Medicaid, the program that provides health insurance to low-income Americans. In exchange for the bump in funds, states agreed to suspend their usual processes…