St. Louis Post Dispatch
By: Michael Ollove
The number of children enrolled in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP — two government health plans for the poor — fell by nearly 600,000 in the first 11 months of 2018, a precipitous drop that has puzzled and alarmed many health policy analysts, while several states say it reflects the good news of an improving economy.
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Repeated but unsuccessful efforts by Republicans in Congress to repeal the ACA caused public confusion, which probably diminished enrollment in Medicaid, CHIP and Obamacare health insurance plans, said Joan Alker, executive director of the Center for Children and Families at Georgetown University. And Congress failed to meet deadlines to reauthorize funding for CHIP in 2017, which prompted several states to prepare for the program’s shutdown.
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Medicaid and CHIP had been steadily gaining coverage since the late 1990s, and more than a third of the nation’s children rely on one or the other for health coverage. Health policy analysts and advocates for low-income children say the decrease might be a sign that more children are going without the health care they need.
“All kinds of warning lights are going off in my head,” said Tricia Brooks, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Health Policy Institute, who has blogged about the sudden drop in enrollment.
