The COVID-19 pandemic emergency declaration ended this spring, along with continuous and automatic enrollment in Medicaid for millions of Americans. Starting in April, states resumed the regular process of making people prove their eligibility for the program, and so far more than 1.2 million people have lost coverage in just 20 states, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
No governors have been more enthusiastic about taking away low-income families’ health care than southern Republican Govs. Ron DeSantis and Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Between them, they’ve stripped coverage away from about 360,000 people: a quarter of a million in Florida and about 110,000 in Arkansas.
DeSantis, though, is outpacing everyone.
One Floridian, identified only as Melissa, told WLRN Public Radio that her children were kicked off of Medicaid with no notice at all. "We never got anything telling us to recertify," she said. "We never got anything saying we were booted out of the system.” She and her husband both work, but neither have coverage available from their jobs. One of their children has insulin-resistant diabetes and the other a heart condition, so both need regular care and prescriptions.
"All we're trying to do is survive," Melissa told the station. "Does it seem fair for the working people who are barely getting by? It doesn't. Then you take away the one thing that they need—health care. How are we going to be healthy enough to continue working?"
Another Florida family, the McHenrys, did receive notice two weeks before being kicked off, leaving them in a panic. They are relying on the sole income of husband Kyle, who works as a mechanic after his wife, Allie, had to quit her job to take care of their 5-year-old son Ryder, who has cancer. His chemotherapy treatment was threatened by the loss of Medicaid. It took Allie several days of wading through conflicting information from the state and hours on the phone to determine that Ryder would still be covered because of his illness, but the rest of the family was out.
There are similar horror stories in Arkansas, where Huckabee Sanders is rushing to push people off of Medicaid and trying to get it done in half the time other states are taking. The rush will almost certainly result in a lot of people who are eligible for the program being kicked out, and having to jump through numerous bureaucratic hoops to get back in.
Last month, 41-year-old Erica Horne was dropped, according to Politico. She suffers from lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, and is providing care for her disabled adult twin sons, the only income she receives. At $17 per hour, she has to ration her own medications in order for her household to get by. She learned she was losing her Medicaid coverage because the state said she hadn’t cooperated with child support enforcement and was told that she had to wait to fix her Medicaid issue until the state Office of Child Support Enforcement got in touch with her to work out the confusion. That didn’t happen, and now her coverage is gone.
“I had to leave my career to stay home with my boys because there’s a shortage of caregivers in the state. Not only do you lose $25,000 a year in income, you lose good benefits, too. You have to rely upon this,” Horne said. “Governor Sanders has said outright, ‘I am here to fix Arkansas. I am here to make life better for Arkansans. I am here for the people of Arkansas.’ Well then, damn it, step up and make it better for all of us.”
These kinds of stories led Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden and Rep. Frank Pallone to demand that the White House take “enforcement action to prevent improper terminations and take other appropriate actions” in a letter last week. They write that “early reports that suggest that some states in the first month of redeterminations have disenrolled hundreds of thousands of individuals for procedural reasons, rather than because they were found to be no longer eligible, and that they are “troubled that many of those individuals who have lost coverage are children, including newborns.”
In response, Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra wrote to governors this week, asking them to slow down these purges and to ensure that people aren’t getting kicked off without due process. “I am deeply concerned with the number of people unnecessarily losing coverage, especially those who appear to have lost coverage for avoidable reasons that State Medicaid offices have the power to prevent or mitigate,” Becerra wrote. He warned that the federal government would intervene to halt the reviews, if necessary, though he didn’t specify which actions the administration would take.
DeSantis and Huckabee Sanders aren’t likely to heed any warning from the Biden administration, especially not DeSantis. He’s too busy trying to burnish his reputation as the most extreme of the not-quite-Trump Republicans running for president. Cooperating with this administration to help families get the health care they need is just about the last thing he’ll want to do.
DeSantis talks about making America Florida. Here’s a preview of what that looks like: maximum cruelty to the most vulnerable and millions of people, including infants and children with cancer, uninsured.
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