Nearly 500,000 people, many of them children, will keep Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program coverage after state officials discovered major errors in their procedures for reviewing eligibility for the programs, federal officials said on Thursday.
After a pandemic-era policy that guaranteed Medicaid coverage lapsed in April, states began checking to see whether tens of millions of Americans covered by the programs still qualified, removing them from the rolls if their incomes had surpassed program limits, among other reasons.
Many states conducted the checks with software that automatically verified whether people were still eligible, using government databases to verify income levels. But 30 states, federal officials confirmed on Thursday, had been vetting statuses incorrectly.
As a result, legions of children lost health coverage when their parents did not return the required forms to confirm the eligibility of everyone in a household. The Biden administration last month warned states about the problem, giving them two weeks to report whether they had improperly disenrolled people.