Nearly 100K Georgia residents removed from Medicaid in June, state officials say

Georgia has removed another 95,000 adults and kids from state insurance rolls as it continues to review who is eligible for coverage now that the federal government has ended a pandemic public health emergency, state officials announced Wednesday.

The removals from Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance represent a little under half of the roughly 217,000 people who were due for renewal in June, the Georgia Department of Community Health said in a news release.

The agency is still reviewing the eligibility of about 57,000 of those people. They will remain insured while the review is pending. The other 64,000 people were renewed.

Federal law prohibited states from removing people from Medicaid during the COVID-19 public health emergency, which started in early 2020 and ended this May. States received extra federal money to cover the expenses.

With the end of the public health emergency, states have one year to review whether people are eligible to remain on Medicaid. By mid-June, more than 1 million people across the nation had been removed from the program, many of them for not filling out paperwork.

Georgia began the review process in April. It removed more than 1,500 people from Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance in May.

It plans to reevaluate eligibility for all the roughly 2.7 million state residents in the two programs by the end of May 2024.