Maryland clocked in as one of the most successful states in the nation at re-enrolling people in Medicaid after the federal government stopped automatically reupping registration when the COVID national emergency ended.
Over the first year of Medicaid “unwinding,” Maryland kept about 70% of eligible people on the health plan.
“The department was very intentional and making exhaustive efforts to ensure that every single person who was eligible for coverage through this renewal process retain their coverage,” Deputy Secretary of Health Care Financing and Medicaid Director Ryan Moran told WYPR.
The state renewed about 1.5 million people for Medicaid over the last year. It also added about 180,000 people, bringing the total number of people on Medicaid in Maryland to about 1.68 million. That is about 250,000 more than when COVID started.
“Maryland is honored to be recognized as a national leader for its redetermination efforts, ranking among the top ten states by the Kaiser Family Foundation for its exceptional performance in retaining enrollees,” said Secretary of Health Dr. Laura Herrera Scott. “Our unwinding efforts over the past year is a testament to the Moore-Miller administration’s commitment to leave no one behind.”
Moran said technology upgrades to make enrollment faster within the health department and targeted marketing campaigns helped keep people on the rolls.
“We have used a very data driven approach to the work throughout the past year of putting resources across the state where we were seeing disenrollments,” Moran said. “For example, we have been publishing zip code data where we saw procedural disenrollment to be higher than other portions of the states. We really rallied more communication as well as grassroot partnership efforts in those areas.”
The Department of Health also used some federal waivers to give people more time and used a program that allowed people on SNAP to automatically enroll in Medicaid.
Going forward, anyone on Medicaid will need to re-enroll in their health plan each year.
Nationally, 94 million people were up for re-enrollment. As of June 28, 52.4 million renewed, 23.8 million lost coverage and 17.9 million are still eligible for renewal, according to KFF.
Maryland ranked 8th in the lowest disenrollment rates among states and the District of Columbia.