During the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government put protections in place to make sure people could access health care, like testing, treatment, and doctors’ visits.
These protections under the Public Health Emergency (PHE) started in March 2020. The PHE also ensured people would have continuous Medicaid coverage, a comprehensive federal program that covers low-income people without having to reapply.
The PHE expired earlier this year. This meant that starting on April 1, states had to determine whether the millions of people who had been added to the Medicaid rolls in the past three years were still eligible.
The Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC) manages Medicaid for the state and is overseeing this process. Since redetermination began earlier this year, about 1.7 million Texans have lost coverage—almost a million of them kids, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Source: Medicaid unwinding exposed a ‘crisis’ in the system as 1.7 million Texans lost coverage / KERA News