Mississippi Removes Thousands of People From Medicaid as It Examines Post-Pandemic Eligibility

The Mississippi State Capitol Building in Jackson, Miss., as seen on March 11, 2022. (Peter Forest/Getty Images for MoveOn & Emmett Till Legacy Foundation)

The Mississippi Division of Medicaid removed more than 29,000 Mississippians from Medicaid at the end of June after the federal government ended the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency.

This marks the first wave of disenrollments as the agency reviews the eligibility of its beneficiaries following the end of pandemic-era protections.

Mississippi examined records for 67,695 Medicaid beneficiaries whose coverage was up for review in June, and about 56 percent of them remain enrolled, the division said Monday. Of the 29,000 who were disenrolled, about 60 percent had remained on Medicaid during the pandemic because of the special eligibility rules.

The Mississippi Division of Medicaid said in a statement that it expects enrollment to continue declining in the coming months as officials review eligibility.

In December 2022, Congress passed the Consolidated Appropriations Act, which required state Medicaid departments to resume eligibility determinations by April 1.

“States are reasserting control over their Medicaid programs because this has cost them a tremendous amount of money. We’re talking hundreds of billions of dollars between the federally enhanced Medicaid funding and the fact that, for every person on the program that is ineligible, that costs state and federal taxpayers additional money. That takes away money from individuals who truly need Medicaid, such as the elderly and those with disabilities,” Hayden Dublois, director of data and analytics at the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA), previously told The Epoch Times.

Rather than decrying the removal of these individuals from the program, Dublois insists it’s a positive development.

“We should be celebrating the fact that states have regained control of their Medicaid programs and can remove these people who are no longer eligible,” he said. “Now they can divert that money to the most vulnerable, those in extreme poverty, and those who have an intellectual, developmental, or physical disability. Those are the people in need. Those are the people the Medicaid program was created for. That’s where we need to be getting this back to.”

Medicaid is a federal program that provides health insurance for low-income people, with costs covered by federal and state tax dollars.

Federal law prohibited state agencies that administer the program from removing people from Medicaid during the COVID-19 public health emergency, which started in early 2020 and ended this May.

For states to receive additional federal funds, they were required to stop periodic eligibility reviews for enrollees. This resulted in an increase in Medicaid enrollment across the nation.

Mississippi Medicaid enrollment increased by 187,894 people, or 26 percent, from March 2020 to June of this year, the agency said in a press release. Total Medicaid expenditures in Mississippi, which include both state and federal funds, increased from $5.92 billion in fiscal year (FY) 2019 to an estimated $7.2 billion in FY 2023.

Nearly 87 million people nationwide were enrolled in Medicaid, according to the most recent available data in March, up more than one-third from the pre-pandemic total of about 64 million in January 2020.

With the end of the public health emergency, states have one year to review whether people are eligible to remain on Medicaid. By mid-June, more than 1 million people across the nation had been removed from the program, many of them for not filling out paperwork.

Medicaid said if beneficiaries believe they have been disenrolled in error, they can appeal the determination. If individuals were disenrolled because they didn’t provide the information required to remain enrolled, once that information is provided, that coverage may be reinstated.

The Associated Press and Patricia Tolson contributed to this report.