Texas’ recent unwinding of Medicaid and CHIP has been criticized, dropping more than a million people eligible for the health insurance programs. Decades ago, Texas officials got kids health insurance in record time.
But underlining the urgency was the fact that Gov. George W. Bush had recently announced his candidacy for president — and his allies on both sides of the aisle in the Legislature knew that a successful program would give him a boost if he made it through the primaries to become the Republican nominee, Fritz said.
Fritz figured the tight deadline was being employed as an effective way to make sure that “we went bananas with the enrollment” in time to get good enough numbers to use in the campaign, he recalled in an interview Monday with The Texas Tribune. State officials said they worked hard to keep eligible people enrolled, and hired new staff to get the job done. But advocates for the poor and disabled say other states did more — and they found themselves wishing for a 1999-like effort from Texas again.
Pete Laney, a Panhandle Democrat who was state House speaker at the time — during which every statewide office holder was a Republican — said that while the program had its detractors, it generally had bipartisan support. That’s an average of nearly 800 kids per day, a triumph for the politicians who needed a win — and a heady victory for the social advocates who had long been frustrated by the the state leadership’s lack of energy behind addressing the uninsured crisis.
The state has a May 31 deadline for the year-long process of updating its rolls in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, during which time federal regulations barred states from removing people from Medicaid or CHIPs. Some 6.1 million Texans were able to access health care continuously, a 50% increase from the typical estimated 4 million recipients.
In the months since the state launched this “unwinding,” critics have said it is being done too quickly and has resulted in too many qualified people being “The main concern with procedural disenrollments is that many people losing Medicaid for these paperwork reasons may still be eligible and do not have another source of health coverage,” KFF researchers wrote in a“We are actively working on additional opportunities to further streamline and automate our eligibility processes,” she said.by Texas 2036, an Austin nonprofit think tank, nearly half of all uninsured children in Texas are qualified for CHIP or Medicaid but are not enrolled.
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