HealthDay News — Nearly 10 million Americans signed up for Medicaid by means of January, and the 80 million men and women now enrolled in the plan is the most in its history.
The surge in enrollment for the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic implies that a quarter of the U.S. population is now covered by the public wellness insurance coverage plan for the poor, The New York Times reported. The new figures have been in a government report released Monday.
“The purpose of Medicaid is for times like this, when there is an economic downturn,” Peggah Khorrami, M.P.H., a researcher with the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who has studied the enhance in Medicaid enrollment for the duration of the pandemic, told The Times. “As people are losing jobs, that’s where Medicaid comes in and we get people insured that way.”
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“In past economic downturns, there has been substantial growth in Medicaid enrollment but it was concentrated among children,” Rachel Garfield, Ph.D., codirector of the Kaiser Family Foundation Program on Medicaid and the Uninsured, told The Times. “This time, it’s interesting we’re seeing much of the enrollment happening among adults.”
Under the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid has been transformed from a targeted wellness care advantage meant to aid specific groups of men and women — such as expectant mothers and these with disabilities — to a a lot wider plan that delivers largely totally free coverage to most men and women beneath a specific earnings threshold. The exception is in 12 states, mainly in the South, that have resisted expanding Medicaid.
