Texas Tribune: Eligible Medicaid Recipients Lost Coverage When Texas Purged Rolls After Pandemic

[Bolo Boffin]

https://www.texastribune.org/2024/09/26/texas-medicaid-unwinding-consequences/

For three years during the coronavirus pandemic, the federal government gave Texas and other states billions of dollars in exchange for their promise not to exacerbate the public health crisis by kicking people off Medicaid.

When that agreement ended last year, Texas moved swiftly, kicking off more people faster than any other state.

Officials acknowledged some errors after they stripped Medicaid coverage from more than 2 million people, most of them children. Some people who believe they were wrongly removed are desperately trying to get back on the state and federally funded health care program, adding to a backlog of more than 200,000 applicants. A ProPublica and Texas Tribune review of dozens of public and private records, including memos, emails and legislative hearings, clearly shows that those and other mistakes were preventable and foreshadowed in persistent warnings from the federal government, whistleblowers and advocates.

Texas’ zealousness in removing people from Medicaid was a choice that contradicted federal guidelines from the start. That decision was devastating in Texas, which already insures a smaller percentage of its population through Medicaid than almost any other state and is one of 10 that never expanded eligibility after the passage of the Affordable Care Act.

The cruelty is the point with the Republicans in charge.

[flying_wahini]

1. It's how the GOP rolls in Texas. I think Abbott figures if they Really need it they will have to fight for it.

It is very much the point. They won’t be happy until people are dying in the streets.

I wish some of these parents with disabled/ sick kids would call the local paper when they are refused care. Get a TV camera out to show the cruelty they love so much.