Study Finds Black and Hispanic Adults Were Twice as Likely to Lose Medicaid Enrollment Since Covid PHE Ended

A new study has found that Black and Hispanic adults were twice as likely as White adults to be unable to renew their Medicaid enrollment after the end of the COVID-19 public health emergency (PHE). CIDRAP has the news.

94 million Americans were continuously enrolled in Medicaid during the COVID-19 PHE. The continuous enrollment provision ended March 31, 2023, at which point “approximately 10 million people…lost Medicaid coverage as states began redetermining enrollees’ Medicaid eligibility,” according to the authors of the study. Three-quarters of these disenrollments were due to “procedural reasons, including incomplete applications, application errors, and inaccurate contact information.”

Experts are worried about “racial disparities in procedural disenrollment” because “roughly 60% of Medicaid enrollees are of minority race.”  As of October 2023, six months after the PHE ended, 32.4 million adults were on the Medicaid rolls; 52.0% were White. Of the 5 million adults dropped from Medicaid, “57.3% said they no longer qualified, 17.4% of whom said they couldn't complete the renewal process. A greater percentage of adults unable to complete the renewal process were Black or Hispanic.” Additionally, Black and Hispanic enrollees were about “twice as likely as their White counterparts to report losing Medicaid coverage because they couldn't complete the renewal process.”