Other Editors: Pandemic tested Medicaid expansion

Mississippi, as with the rest of the country, has been steadily lopping people off the Medicaid rolls for the past two months.

In June alone, 29,000 people in Mississippi were removed from the government health insurance program that provides coverage to the poor, disabled and elderly.

The substantial purging is not nefarious, though. It is the result of catching up on eligibility checks that had been suspended, by federal government order, for more than three years during the COVID-19 pandemic. Once on the Medicaid rolls during this time, there was no coming off them, no matter how a person's circumstances or income changed. For instance, pregnant women who would normally have lost their Medicaid coverage a couple of months after giving birth (now 12 months following a legislative change this year) remained on the program as long as the declaration of a public health emergency remained in effect.

With that declaration having ended in May, every state has restarted the periodic recertifications of eligibility and been given one year to catch up on the backlog. Not surprisingly, many beneficiaries no longer qualify — more than 1 million nationally have been decertified by mid-June alone.

Still, one has to wonder, in the case of Mississippi, how many of those losing coverage would still be insured if this state had expanded Medicaid to cover the mostly working poor.

Gov. Tate Reeves, who used to say that Mississippi couldn't afford the cost of Medicaid expansion, has had to adopt a different tune, with the state experiencing record surpluses, including $700 million in the budget year that just ended. He now says that expanding Medicaid would squander this surplus that he'd rather use to pursue complete elimination of the state's already diminished personal income tax.

He ignores, of course, the majority of the economic research that says Medicaid expansion — for which the federal government picks up at least 90% of the cost — wouldn't cost the state a penny once the additional tax revenue generated by the extra billion-dollar-a-year infusion from Washington is taken into account.

The pandemic, as it turns out, was a quasi-test of Medicaid expansion. Mississippi, because it couldn't remove any beneficiaries, saw its enrollment rise by almost 190,000, or 26% — not much less than what the real Medicaid expansion would do. During this time, the state's treasury also ballooned with cash.

Was that just a coincidence or a correlation? We suspect at least some of the latter. Mississippi's coffers grew in large part because of the bundles of money Washington threw at the pandemic to try to control the virus and keep it from tanking the national economy. The money went to individuals and businesses as well as local and state governments, including Mississippi's Medicaid program to cover the expense of the suspended eligibility reviews.

As the Medicaid rolls are pared down, if our suspicion is right, the state treasury will feel it in a negative way. Let's watch and see.

Greenwood Commonwealth, July 13

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