More than a million children nationwide have lost their coverage since December 2017 in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, the two major state-federal health plans for lower-income children, The New York Times reported on Tuesday.
Although some government officials insist this drop in coverage is good news because it means more people are receiving coverage from employers in an improved economy and no longer need public assistance, growing evidence suggests that the declines in those covered are mostly due to complicated procedures to keep children enrolled due to administrative changes aimed at combatting fraud and waste, as well as increasing fears of deportation in immigrant communities, according to the Times.
This theory is based on the fact that some of the states that had the largest increases in uninsured children were those that iniated rules to check the eligibility of families more frequently or that reset their lists with new computer systems.
In other states with large immigrant populations, there is growing concern among parents that signing up their children, who are citizens, may harm their own chances of getting a green card or boost their risk of deportation.
Eliot Fishman, who was a top Medicaid official in the Obama administration and is now a senior director at the consumer group Families USA, insisted that the way some states are conducting the eligibility tests “seems clearly designed to throw people off this program.”
This is especially unfortunate, according to this argument, because Obamacare made it easier for families to qualify for these programs, leading to a record-low uninsured rate among children of less than five percent in 2016, according to Georgetown University Health Policy Institute.
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