A massive 14-month effort to verify the eligibility of millions of Massachusetts residents for the state’s Medicaid program ended with about 363,000 fewer people on the public insurance program’s rolls, MassHealth announced on Thursday.
It was the first time since the start of the pandemic that people were asked to reapply for MassHealth. Membership in the program swelled during the public health crisis, when federal law barred Medicaid administrators nationwide from conducting standard annual eligibility reviews. The pause eased the hardship for people who lost jobs and health insurance during the height of the crisis.
By April 2023, MassHealth’s membership grew to nearly 2.4 million people, according to state data. Before the pandemic, MassHealth’s baseline membership was just shy of 1.8 million members. It now stands at just over 2 million.
The drop in membership was about what the state had predicted in its latest budget proposal, which allocated $20.3 billion in spending on MassHealth, said Mike Levine, assistant secretary for MassHealth.
“We’re landing about where we thought we’d be,” he said.
The reenrollment, called redetermination, affected about a third of the state’s population and involved an outreach effort to hundreds of thousands considered at high risk of losing health insurance. MassHealth was able to automatically reenroll people whose incomes could be confirmed, but there remained many whose eligibility status was unclear. Those who fell into that grey area had to fill out reenrollment forms and, in some cases, provide additional data to confirm they qualified for Medicaid.
Others no longer qualified and needed help finding alternatives. At the beginning of the process, state officials expressed concern that everyone who might be affected had sufficient notice about the reenrollment process.
“Things could have gone very, very wrong,” said Amy Rosenthal, executive director of Health Care for All, a Boston nonprofit health care advocacy group, which led the outreach effort.
Read the full article here.