At least 1.5 million Medicaid enrollees in 25 states and the District of Columbia have been disenrolled as of June 22, following the end of the COVID-19 public health emergency. In Connecticut, at least through May, 46,140 Medicaid recipients have been disenrolled.
However, the Connecticut Department of Social Services says about one-third who have lost coverage as of April have already enrolled in another program like Covered Connecticut or with a qualified health plan offered through Access Health CT.
Claudio Gualtieri, undersecretary of Health and Human Services at the Office of Policy and Management, said last week that 90% of Connecticut residents have some sort of health insurance coverage.
“Those without coverage are going to be the most challenging to reach,” Gualtieri said at the Access Health CT board meeting.
According to the Department of Social Services, approximately 20,000 individuals who needed to take action to renew their Medicaid eligibility by the end of April did not do so or were determined ineligible and their coverage ended. That April cohort of individuals up for redetermination were last reviewed in March, April or May 2020, at the inception of the pandemic when unemployment skyrocketed.
That means many of those individuals may have had situations that changed and their income may have risen as the economy and the labor market improved.
As of mid-June, over 7,000 of these individuals have already come back in and reestablished their eligibility for Medicaid and another 1,300 have enrolled in Covered Connecticut or a qualified health plan.
As of the end of May, the total decline in Medicaid enrollment from the end of pandemic peak was 1.1%
The Department of Social Services said that approximately 25,000 individuals who needed to take action to renew their Medicaid eligibility by the end of May did not do so or were determined ineligible and lost coverage. Since May had a higher overall renewal volume than April, the initial data suggests that the percentage of closures in May are in line with April and the state can expect similar outcomes.
Nationwide, the Department of U.S. Health and Human Services estimates about 15 million people will lose Medicaid coverage as states review eligibility. Many of these people will be eligible for insurance through the Affordable Care Act marketplace or an employer.
But 6.8 million people are expected to lose Medicaid coverage even though they remain eligible.
In Connecticut, the latest numbers from the US Census on US health coverage found that there were 184,000 uninsured Connecticut residents or 5.2% in 2021, down 23,000 from 2019, which was 5.9%.
