The Medicaid redetermination process is off to a poor start, according to Adrianna McIntyre, PhD, an assistant professor of health policy and politics at Boston-based Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
"We expected it to be bad," Dr. McIntyre said in a July 12 article on the school's website. "It was estimated that 15 million people will lose Medicaid coverage as a result of this unwinding. Some of those people could already have other sources of coverage, maybe through an employer, maybe through a spouse's employer, or maybe they've aged into Medicare. But a lot of states are seeing high rates of what we call procedural terminations."
Dr. McIntyre pointed to Arkansas as one state that is particularly concerning because it is attempting to complete its redeterminations in six months. CMS, meanwhile, has asked states to take 12 to 14 months to complete the process. As of July 12, 79 percent of people who have been disenrolled from Medicaid in Arkansas have been for procedural reasons, according to KFF.
Dr. McIntyre added that termination rates have varied across states, which she said is probably in part due to states putting different levels of effort into outreach to keep people enrolled. There are also differences in states' technological capacities.
"Some states are really good at automatically renewing people," she said. "Their systems can quickly ping different data sources, such as people's SNAP records, IRS data, and wage or unemployment data, so they can say, 'We're pretty sure this person is still eligible for Medicaid, so we're going to keep them enrolled.' In the states with the best systems, over three-quarters of renewals happen through this automatic process.
"But many state systems don't perform these eligibility assessments well, either because the state doesn't have access to reliable data or has a hard time moving data across silos. In those cases, the state mails out a form and can only make a redetermination of the person's eligibility if the enrollee returns the form."
Read the full article here.