According to experts, next year might witness a sharp rise in the number of children without healthcare coverage due to the ending of a congressional emergency provision to deal with the COVID pandemic.
The Families First Coronavirus Response Act – passed in March 2020 – is set to expire in January of the coming year. This has raised some serious concerns that the thousands of children who gained coverage under this act might lose it entirely.
The loss of coverage will come as a result of ‘redetermination’ – a process that ensures that those covered by a state’s Medicaid program meet the eligibility requirements. If an individual or family has surpassed the income limit to qualify, or if they move out of state, they lose their Medicaid coverage. Typically, the redetermination process is annual, but it hasn’t taken place since early 2020 due to the declared public health emergency brought about due to COVID-19.
A survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of kids aged under 19 with no health insurance plummeted below 4 million in 2021. In comparison to 2019, this represented a drop of approximately 475,000 children, thanks primarily to higher enrollment in Medicaid. The compilation of the Medicaid enrollment statistics was overseen by Joan Alker, a research professor at Georgetown University. She described the increase in medical enrollment as a ‘silver lining’ for kids during the especially troubling times brought about by the pandemic.
Alker reported that recent data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) shows that over 40 million children in the country – representing over half of the total children population – are enrolled in Medicaid or CHIP. These particular enrollments rose by 5.6 million from early 2020 to mid-2022. Alker said that she cannot wait to explore this data in greater detail in the annual report on children’s health insurance trends – expected to be released sometime in the middle of November.
“This is the first comprehensive look at the pandemic period from ACS since 2020 data was not released. My hunch is that states that have large numbers of uninsured children and are prone to using administrative barriers to keeping eligible children out of Medicaid/CHIP or dropping them at renewal will see some of the largest improvements in their child uninsured rates,” she said. “Looking at you, Texas, Georgia, Florida.”
The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that compared to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, 25% more people are currently covered by Medicaid. Hence, it stands to reason that the percentage of insured children is also greater than when the pandemic first reared its head in early 2020.
In Texas, the number of children with no health coverage dropped from nearly 13% in 2019 to 11.8% two years later, indicating an increase in the number of kids covered either by Medicaid alone or a combination of multiple benefits.
It must be understood, though, that returning to normal after PHE will not be simple at all. The process of reevaluating Medicaid populations’ eligibility once the public health emergency is over may actually take up to a year, according to some state regulators in Florida.
