Like so many others, Heather Hantz found out the hard way that her son's health insurance had vanished.
Harrison is one of at least 128,000 children who, over a two-year span, were purged from TennCare or CoverKids, two Tennessee government health insurance programs for low-income families. It appears tens of thousands of these children have not acquired private insurance, so they likely joined the swelling ranks of the uninsured residents of Tennessee, already one of the unhealthiest states in the nation.
After being questioned by The Tennessean, TennCare officials took this recent data offline and insisted it was incorrect, saying there had been no historic cuts in February. New enrollment data for February has not yet been made public. Scenes like this are a result of the disenrollments from TennCare, which some say has not done enough to inform families across the state their insurance has lapsed. Evans, a longtime pediatrician with a majority of patients on TennCare, said at least once a week a family discovers it has lost coverage while in her clinic, then must make a tough decision whether to pay for care out of pocket.
For this story, The Tennessean analyzed monthly enrollment data from five years of TennCare and two years of CoverKids, all of which is publicly available online. The analysis shows children began to leave TennCare at the end of 2016 as the government ramped up a renewal process that identifies and cuts ineligible families.Kelly Gunderson, a TennCare spokeswoman, said in an email statement that the size of the program has followed expectations.
Unsurprisingly, in the same years that TennCare and CoverKids cut so many children, the number of uninsured kids in the state sharply increased, according to recent studies from Georgetown University and the University of Tennessee. These two studies measured uninsured children very differently but agreed on the conclusion that the problem is worsening.