GOP states lead drive to boot poor kids off Medicaid: report

Millions of people, including children, have in recent months lost access to Medicaid, the federal program intended to provide health insurance coverage for low-income Americans.

Axios reports that numbers released by the Biden White House show that a whopping 60 percent of people who have been booted off Medicaid this year come from just nine states, all of which are led by Republicans.

The states in question are Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Montana, New Hampshire, Ohio, South Dakota and Texas, all of which have both Republican governors and state legislatures, although New Hampshire's House of Representatives at the moment is almost evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats.

Per Axios, Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra this week sent letters to all nine states warning them to comply with federal Medicaid requirements or face unspecified repercussions.

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In interviews with Axios, officials in those states insisted that they were complying with regulations and that their purging of Medicaid roles wasn't a deliberate attempt to deny low-income children access to health care.

"At least 2.2 million kids have been removed from Medicaid and its sister program, the Children's Health Insurance Program, during the so-called 'unwinding' of pandemic-era coverage protections as of September, according to data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services," the publication writes.

"Many may have been disenrolled because of a procedural issue and not necessarily because they were no longer eligible. States have been restoring coverage for over 500,000 people, many of them children, who were inappropriately booted from Medicaid because of an error in calculating income."