With the two-year “Medicaid unwinding” process nearly half complete, 9.5 million Americans have lost their Medicaid coverage – among them more than 3.7 million children.

To date, 48 million of the 71 million people enrolled in Medicaid at pandemic’s end have had their eligibility reviewed.  So far, many of those who were at first ruled ineligible were dropped for procedural reasons, such as failing to file paperwork on time, but many of those people eventually had their benefits restored.

Still, estimates that 15 million people would lose their Medicaid eligibility by the time the process ended appear to be overlying optimistic; 17 million appears more likely, with both the speed of the review process and the rejection rate varying greatly from state to state.

The outcome of this two-year review is of great importance to community safety-net hospitals like those that are part of the Alliance of Safety-Net Hospitals because they generally serve low-income, disadvantaged communities.  As a result, they are more likely than most to serve patients who might lose their Medicaid benefits and join the ranks of the uninsured – while still needing care that these mission-driven hospitals are committed to providing.

Learn more about how the Medicaid unwinding process is affecting those who were enrolled in Medicaid when the pandemic ended from the Washington Post article “Halfway through ‘unwinding,’ Medicaid enrollment is down about 10 million.”