Roughly 200,000 Nevadans’ health care coverage is likely to be affected by the March 31 end of a pandemic-era federal policy requiring states to keep Medicaid recipients continuously enrolled in the health care program for low-income people.

It’s a change that will take place over the next year and one that officials warn if done recklessly could potentially lead to hundreds of thousands of Nevadans without the coverage they have come to rely on. Through the pandemic, Nevada Medicaid saw a historic rise in enrollment leading to about one in three Nevadans being covered under the joint federal and state program.

As part of the shift from continuous enrollment and back to annual eligibility checks, states have a 12-month “unwinding period” of checking the beneficiaries on Medicaid rolls for eligibility compliance, removing those who no longer qualify based on income or other factors. 

A Medicaid enrollment and unwinding tracker from health policy research group KFF indicated that as of late June, Nevada has a 59 percent disenrollment rate for completed reviews (pending renewals are excluded), placing the Silver State in the top five highest disenrollment rates across all reporting states. 

However, officials with Nevada Medicaid and the state Division of Welfare and Supportive Services said in a joint statement to The Nevada Independent that a state-by-state comparison of disenrollment rates is not an apples-to-apples comparison because each state has different starting dates for unwinding, various numbers of members coming on to Medicaid during the pandemic and different methods of approaching the unwind.

“Each month different states are likely to have different disenrollment rates,” state officials said.

Read the rest of this article, which was shared with Noticiero Móvil, over at The Nevada Independent. This story was reported by Tabitha Mueller and Gabby Birenbaum and originally published on July 7, 2023.