The end of Medicaid means that a lot of American people no longer have health insurance. Americans are having a harder time keeping Medicaid, especially since help with the pandemic ended, which meant that many people who didn’t apply for Medicaid couldn’t get insurance.
The people who reapplied for Medicaid weeks or months after being dropped said they shouldn’t have been kicked off in the first place, according to a national poll.
More than twenty percent of Americans say they don’t have health insurance right now, but nearly thirty percent said they were able to get insurance through their job or Medicare.
A health policy associate professor at Yale University, Chima Ndumele, said, “23% is a shocking number, especially when you think about how many people lost Medicaid coverage.”
When someone loses their insurance, they may not have health insurance for a while, which can be expensive and leave them without coverage for a long time.
People who were being kicked off of Medicaid had to quickly find other options. Pennsylvanian Adrienne Hamar said it was hard to get on the phone with someone to talk about other insurance for her and her two kids after they lost Medicaid.
A co-author of the KFF story named Jennifer Tolbert said that this kind of thing happens all the time. “People’s current insurance status is likely to be very much in flux, and we would expect at least some of the people who say they are currently uninsured to reenroll in Medicaid — many say they are still trying — or enroll in other coverage within a short period of time,” she stated.
