PA Medicaid Enrollment May Plummet in the Coming Months
As many as 500,000 Pennsylvanians are expected to come off the state’s Medicaid rolls after the formal COVID-19 public health emergency ends and state officials are permitted to reconsider the eligibility of the state’s 3.5 million Medicaid recipients for the first time in more than two years.
Since the pandemic’s start the state’s Medicaid enrollment has risen 20 percent; approximately 100,000 of the 500,000 new enrollees live in Philadelphia, where more than 750,000 of the city’s residents now receive their health care through the program.
When the pandemic began the federal government offered the states additional money to support their Medicaid programs; in exchange, the states needed to agree not to review recipient eligibility for the duration of the public health emergency. When the pandemic ends, though, states will have one year to review the eligibility of all of their Medicaid recipients. While the federal government has encouraged states to take the full year to complete this task, Pennsylvania Medicaid officials have indicated that they hope to complete the process in six months. A bill in the state legislature would give Medicaid officials even less time, calling for the review to be completed within 60 days.
Learn more about what the end of the COVID-19 public health emergency may mean for enrollment in Pennsylvania’s Medicaid program in the WHYY report “Pennsylvanians on Medicaid risk losing health coverage when COVID emergency ends.”
The state’s Medicaid rolls have grown by approximately 600,000 during the pandemic, and under the terms Congress set for states to receive additional federal funding to support their Medicaid programs, the state was prohibited from re-evaluating the eligibility of those receiving Medicaid and removing them from the state’s Medicaid rolls if they were found ineligible. Once the pandemic officially ends, however, states will once again be able to review the eligibility of their Medicaid participants. In Pennsylvania today, that amounts to approximately 3.4 million people.
As a result, Pennsylvania has added nearly 400,000 people to its Medicaid rolls in the past year. Today, 3.2 million Pennsylvanians are enrolled in the state’s program, although among them are approximately 250,000 who would have been dropped from the program except for a federal requirement that the state not drop people from the program in exchange for a major increase in federal aid for the state’s program.