(ConservativeSense.com) – Poverty experts are blasting the Biden administration for not doing enough to prevent millions of Americans from being purged from Medicaid as states review enrollments, the Associated Press reported.
According to the health consulting firm Avalere, up to 30 million people could lose Medicaid as states reevaluate Medicaid enrollment, and many may be purged from the program due to what poverty experts claim are error-ridden reviews.
Some of the problems include confusing government forms, long hold times on the phone, and children being wrongly dropped from the program.
Legal Aid Arkansas attorney Trevor Hawkins told the Associated Press that Arkansas officials worked to “swiftly disenroll” around 420,000 people in just six months. Hawkins notified the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services of the problems with the process, including forms that instructed Medicaid recipients that they had to reapply instead of renewing.
Multiple Medicaid advocates nationwide have highlighted widespread problems they’ve discovered while assisting some of the approximately 10 million Americans who have already lost Medicaid coverage, and they are concerned that the Biden administration is ignoring the problems.
Last year, Congress ended a pandemic-era policy that prevented states from removing anyone from Medicaid during the pandemic. This required states to review the eligibility of every enrollee over the following year. At the same time, the Democrat-controlled House also granted Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra the authority to impose fines on states or stop a state’s dis-enrollment if individuals were removed from Medicaid improperly.
Earlier this year, HHS briefly stopped dis-enrollment in 14 states. However, the agency did not disclose which states they were or why the dis-enrollments were paused.
According to Jennifer Wagner, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ Medicaid eligibility and enrollment director, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services has been playing nice with states in hopes that the agency can help improve the enrollment process.
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