Millions of people became uninsured as Medicaid programs cut coverage, new data show

The national uninsured rate rose from 7.7% to 8.2% earlier this year, a result of states booting millions of Americans from their state Medicaid programs, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The 7.7% uninsured rate in 2023 was a record low at the time, but didn’t factor in any of the people who were losing their Medicaid coverage.

Overall, more than 27 million people had no form of health insurance as of March 2024, compared with more than 25 million people at the same time in 2023, the CDC reported Tuesday. The data come from the CDC’s quarterly National Health Interview Survey. More than 1 million working-age adults entered the ranks of the uninsured, while 700,000 kids younger than 18 also lost their coverage.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, states were not allowed to remove people from their Medicaid programs, which provide health coverage to low-income adults and children. But those protections ended in April 2023, allowing states to re-evaluate whether people were still eligible based on their income.

Nearly 25 million people have lost their Medicaid coverage since states started redetermining eligibility, according to the health policy group KFF. Some enrollees had their coverage terminated inappropriately due to old, faulty computer systems used by Medicaid agencies and other clerical errors.

Most people who lost Medicaid pivoted to other forms of coverage: by buying health plans on the state and federal marketplaces established by the Affordable Care Act, moving into workplace health plans, or finding other forms of coverage. 

The ACA marketplaces, in particular, have hit record levels of enrollment with Medicaid enrollees shifting into heavily subsidized ACA plans. More than 16.6 million people had an ACA health plan as of March, according to the CDC’s report.

Many health insurance companies that sell those taxpayer-funded plans — including Centene and Molina Healthcare — told investors last month that they are profiting from the growth of those enrollments.

“The [ACA] marketplace landscape continues to shift positively in our direction,” Centene CEO Sarah London said during the company’s earnings call last month. “We see an increasingly accessible, addressable market, giving us exciting room to run in this business.”

However, the CDC data suggest millions of people simply never found another form of health insurance. The federal government has been working with states to increase the number of automatic Medicaid renewals, although states are reporting large backlogs in those types of renewals.