Medicaid Shake-Up: 427,000 Arkansans Lose Coverage
Over 427,000 people in Arkansas no longer have Medicaid. This happened in the last six months when Arkansas became one of the first states to review who’s eligible for Medicaid after the COVID-19 pandemic. More than half of the people under review had their Medicaid coverage dropped.
During the pandemic, states couldn’t remove anyone from Medicaid, but that rule ended in April. States had to start checking if people were still eligible. While the rule was in place, Medicaid grew by about one-third, from 71 million in February 2020 to 94 million in April 2023.
The federal government says states have 14 months to finish these reviews. But Arkansas had to get it done in just six months, according to a 2021 state law.
Kristi Putnam, the head of Arkansas’s Department of Human Services, said, “We’re proud of how fast we did this. We want to make sure only those who really need Medicaid get it.”
Republican Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ administration thinks the review process was a success. It gave about 298,000 people their Medicaid back in the past six months. But national groups see it differently.
Just like in many states, a lot of people in Arkansas lost Medicaid for technical reasons, like not sending back the forms needed to check if they still qualified. Health experts believe some of these people might still qualify if the state had all their info.
People who lost Medicaid can get it back if they prove they still qualify within 90 days.
But Grant Tennille, the head of the Arkansas Democratic Party, says the damage is done. “It’s not just an inconvenience; it can delay or even stop necessary medical treatments. We’re playing with people’s lives.”
Arkansas’ House Minority Leader, Tippi McCullough, a Democrat, thinks people are losing stable healthcare coverage, and she says the system failed Arkansas families.
While Arkansas was speeding up its reviews, other states paused and slowed down the process. Federal officials had concerns about mistakes in how some states were doing these checks. Children were getting wrongly flagged as ineligible.
Arkansas says it didn’t have these problems, but about 149,000 kids lost their Medicaid in the past six months.
Joan Alker of the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families says Arkansas is among the worst in the nation in losing kids’ Medicaid coverage.