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Minnesota and other states can do little for Medicaid recipients who will lose coverage now that the pandemic-era freeze in removing families who no longer qualify. It is estimated that between 100,000 and 300,000 Minnesota recipients of Medicaid will do so. lose coverage during the next year.
But a bill directed at Gov. Tim Walz would help smooth the transition and mitigate the effects of what has come to be known as “Unwinding Medicaid,” the federally required process by which each recipient would be required to confirm they still meet income requirements – Up to $37,000 for a family of four – for the federal/state health insurance program.
Starting Friday, one in 1.5 million Minnesotans will be reviewed on Medicaid each month. Some will lose coverage permanently. Others may lose it temporarily while trying to show that they still qualify.
“The dismantling process will be unprecedented, it will be complex, and it will be difficult,” Rep. Mahmoud Nour, a Minneapolis Diffler player, said during a debate on the bill Thursday. He curated the house version of Bill To provide funds to the State Department of Human Services as well as the counties and One Tribe will work with the beneficiaries. Minnesota is one of only 10 states that provides the most social services at the county level, rather than at the state level.
“It’s going to be difficult for entrants who have to put up with this process, because for the past three years there hasn’t been any renewal process,” said Noor, chairwoman of the House Human Services Committee. And counties need money to hire and train staff to complete work that is mostly a paper process — work they stopped doing at the start of the pandemic.
In the spring of 2020, Congress directed states to keep all current Medicaid beneficiaries in the program for the duration of the public health emergency. And the federal government compensated states that potentially increased their share of Medicaid costs as ineligible beneficiaries remained on coverage. Those payments—$1.8 billion to Minnesota alone—more than covered the state’s growing share of the cost and even contributed to the growth of the state’s revenue surplus.
While the federal public health emergency won’t expire until the end of May, Congress voted in December to end the provision of continued Medicaid coverage early, on March 31, 2023. That has left states scrambling to create and pay for a process to reconsider the eligibility of each recipient.
The bill is also being paid to the navigators, which are nonprofit agencies that contract with the state to work with beneficiaries to help them in the process. Some specialize in working with recipients who speak languages other than English. Finally, the bill waives one year of premiums that beneficiaries pay for state-subsidized MinnesotaCare. This is a program that helps insure residents who earn too much to qualify for Medicaid but do not have employer-provided insurance or cannot afford the policies in the private individual market. It is one landing place for those who no longer qualify for Medicaid.
The language on the other bills says that once recipients are deemed eligible, they cannot be excluded from coverage for a year in an effort to reduce the natural disruption of people whose finances change and go in and out of the program. Children must remain under continuing eligibility for longer periods under the bill.
Nour said the point of the bill is for no one to lose coverage, though that would be the best outcome.
“We’re trying to do the best we can with this bill to ensure Minnesota doesn’t lose its coverage,” he said. “This is about life and death.”
During the pandemic, the number of cases has increased in Minnesota and nationwide. Because the normal momentum of people joining and leaving the program has stalled, state DHS officials said, enrollment has grown by 330,000 enrollments during the pandemic. This represents a 28% increase in the number of cases. Nationally, Medicaid enrollment grew 27.9% to 90.9 million people, an increase the Kaiser Family Foundation attributes to the provision of continuous enrollment but also to additional states embracing Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act and the economic impacts of the pandemic that may have made More people fit.
Bill – Senate File No. 2265 – The Senate passed it on Monday, by a 46-vote, bipartisan vote. The House passed it Thursday 82-44 and now goes to Governor Tim Walz, who asked for funding for the program and is expected to sign the law.
One concern raised by House Republicans was the 12-month suspension of a program called “cyclical data matching” that compares information about state aid applicants with other records the state keeps on income, car and home values, and applications for other programs. The purpose is to find inconsistencies in the information provided that may indicate fraud.
“I agree with you that we don’t want to exclude one person from a public program, but I wouldn’t put the time period at that point in the sentence,” said Rep. Kurt Doudt, R-N. “I would add, unless they are ineligible or are fraudulently accessing this program.” Daoud said suspending the match program could cost the state millions in the case of unearned fraud.
Nour said matching will resume after the 12-month disengagement process is complete.
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