As of now, a lot of American people don’t have health insurance because they lost Medicaid. It’s getting harder for Americans to keep Medicaid, especially since help with the pandemic ended, which meant that many people who didn’t qualify for Medicaid couldn’t get insurance.
Numerous Americans who were dropped from Medicaid later applied again weeks or months later, saying they shouldn’t have been. They said they should have been given those benefits in the first place.
More than 20% of Americans say they don’t have health insurance right now, but nearly 30% of Americans said they were able to get insurance through their job or Medicare.
When you think about how many people lost Medicaid coverage, 23% is a very big number, according to Chima Ndumele, an associate professor of health policy at Yale University School of Public Health.
If someone loses their insurance, they might not have health insurance for a while, which can be expensive and leave them without coverage for a long time.
When people were kicked off of Medicaid, they had to quickly find other ways to get money. Adrienne Hamar, who lives in Pennsylvania, said it was hard to get in touch with someone to talk about possible new insurance for her and her two children after they lost Medicaid.
Jennifer Tolbert, who helped write the KFF story, said that things like this happen 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 added.