With the end of the COVID-19 public health emergency, states are now undertaking in earnest the challenge of reconsidering Medicaid eligibility for millions of people currently on their Medicaid rolls – something federal law has prohibited them from doing since the early days of the pandemic.

And while 65 percent of those currently enrolled in Medicaid, according to a recent survey, are unaware of the current process and the possibility that they may soon lose their Medicaid eligibility, states are already reconsidering beneficiaries’ eligibility.

Loss of Medicaid eligibility poses a particular problem for community safety-net hospitals, such as those that are part of the Alliance of Safety-Net Hospitals, because those hospitals serve so many more Medicaid beneficiaries and are therefore more dependent on Medicaid to pay for the care they provide to low-income residents of their communities.

Learn more about what has become known as “Medicaid unwinding” and the impact it is starting to have on long-time Medicaid participants, in Arizona, Florida, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere in the NPR report “In some states, hundreds of thousands dropped from Medicaid.”