PA Faces Major Challenge Reviewing Medicaid Eligibility
As many as 30 percent of Pennsylvanians currently on the state’s Medicaid rolls may soon become ineligible for the program, according to a new report.
When the COVID-19 pandemic began, Congress temporarily expanded Medicaid eligibility and directed additional money to states for their Medicaid programs. The catch? Once deemed eligible, participating states were prohibited from dropping those Medicaid participants from their programs for the duration of the public health emergency.
That continuous Medicaid eligibility, however, will end on April 1 and states have one year to redetermine Medicaid eligibility for everyone currently enrolled in the program. In Pennsylvania, the state estimates that nearly 600,000 of the 3.6 million people now participating in the program will lose their eligibility and another nearly 600,000 may be in danger of doing so.
The implications of reduced Medicaid enrollment for the state’s safety-net hospitals are serious: hundreds of thousands of people who have health insurance today may soon be without health insurance but will continue turning to hospitals – and especially, to safety-net hospitals – for care.
Learn more about the challenge Pennsylvania faces today and how the state plans to address it from the AP article “Resuming Medicaid case checks confronts 3.6M in Pennsylvania.”
During the PHE, the number of uninsured children in the state fell from 4.6 percent to 4.4 percent, but some of that improvement could be reversed as the state begins to redetermine the eligibility of more than 3.5 million people currently on the state’s Medicaid rolls after a more than two-year hiatus in eligibility reviews. Today, more than 1.4 million children in Pennsylvania are enrolled in Medicaid or CHIP.
The process of determining Medicaid eligibility in Pennsylvania either begins or works its way through the state’s county assistance offices.