![]() ![]() Under the Families First Act, signed into law by former president Donald Trump in March 2020, federal subsidies for states’ Medicaid programs were made more generous, but on two conditions: as long as those states didn’t make being eligible for the program harder for their residents and as long as they didn’t kick anyone already enrolled in the program off their rolls. So does the fact that he’s undoing a major welfare state expansion that his right-wing predecessor Donald Trump put in place - the same man who may well wind up being his election opponent again in 2024. The fact that this is happening under a self-proclaimed progressive president that wants to win back working-class voters makes this all the more galling. Worse, based on historical trends, 6.8 million of those people will lose their Medicaid coverage in spite of still being eligible for it simply because of bureaucratic trifles: they’ll fail to renew their enrollment, something the emergency declaration meant they haven’t needed to do for the past three years, or because they’ve changed addresses, they won’t get the blue envelope letter in the mail for them to carry out their renewal. What this means is that, by the estimates of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), 15 million people are going to lose their health insurance over the next few months, including 5.3 million kids. Five GOP-controlled states got the ball rolling this past weekend on shunting people off the programs’ rolls, with all other states set to follow suit between May and July. In this case, the vehicle isn’t a radical, anti-government budget or legislation aimed at ending “welfare as we know it,” but a far more low-key strategy: Biden’s simple refusal to renew the public health emergency declaration for the coronavirus pandemic first issued three years ago.Īs a result, this past Saturday marked the start of the government’s unraveling of the pandemic-driven expansion of Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), which saw enrollment in the programs swell 28.5 percent since February 2020 to a historic 91 million beneficiaries. ![]() Under President Joe Biden, Americans are currently witnessing one of the most significant contractions of the US welfare state since the Bill Clinton years. No, not the transformative presidency of Rooseveltian ambition for the age of climate disaster that we’ve been promised since mid-2020, or even a Great Society–like major expansion of the often punishing US safety net. Americans alive today can consider themselves lucky, because as you read these words, you’re bearing witness to the unfolding of monumental history. ![]()
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