A million children who had been covered by Medicaid no longer are, thanks to the Trump administration. From giving states more leeway to tighten requirements and kick people out of the program to stoking fears of immigrants and scaring them away, the administration is making life more dangerous for children.
One example is 9-month-old Elijah Johnson in Texas. The New York Times reported, "The baby's lips were turning blue from lack of oxygen in the blood when his mother, Kristin Johnson, rushed him to an emergency room here last month. Only after he was admitted to intensive care with a respiratory virus did Ms. Johnson learn that he had been dropped from Medicaid coverage." Elijah survived, as have Johnson's other two children who have also been dropped from coverage. "I've been on this emotional roller coaster," Johnson said. "It's been a very scary month."
According to Census Department records from December 2017 and June 2019, more than a million children "disappeared from the rolls of the two main state-federal health programs for lower-income children, Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program." The children have not disappeared, but their health coverage has. That's about 3% of all enrolled children. While the administration is arguing that this means the economy is improving and parents are getting coverage for their families from employers, the numbers say otherwise. States that haven’t adopted new rules on public coverage, enabled by the administration, have made it more difficult to obtain that coverage.
The biggest losses for children were in red states, such as Texas and Tennessee and Florida. They've created more and more hoops for parents to jump through to maintain eligibility for children, and in states with large immigrant populations, they have intimidated them with mass deportations. "My worst fear is that I could end up without my legal status and be separated from my children," a woman named Maricela told the Times. "That would be fatal for me." She didn't share her last name out of fear of being deported for speaking out. She's from El Salvador, a hotel housekeeper with a green card and a single mother of two, one of whom has asthma. Because of the threat to his life, she decided to re-enroll both children. "I had to do it," she said. "But I'm afraid."
Elijah's emergency also put Kristin Johnson in touch with an enrollment counsellor, who has helped her figure out how to navigate the new, onerous system and get her three children re-enrolled. That is, until she gets the next notice that she has just 10 days to provide proof of income before they're dropped.