Minnesotans by a wide margin support the Medicaid eligibility checks featured in the GOP’s “Big Beautiful Bill”.
In a recent poll of 500 Minnesotans conducted May 28-31 by the Center of the American Experiment, respondents were asked about Medicaid checks to remove ineligible enrollees:
- 75% support yearly eligibility checks
- 58% support Medicaid recipients work or be looking for work
- 89% want a requirement that recipients live in the state
When work requirements were supplemented with “or school” for able bodied adults, a national poll found the support climbed to 88% support. Minnesotans, by a clear majority, want to make sure Medicaid recipients live in the state, don’t make too much money, aren’t on another plan and are not dead. Their skepticism is warranted.
According to a report released this week from the General Accounting Office, over $31 billion in “improper payments” are sent to the states every year for Medicaid. Most of this money is wasted on people who do not qualify.
From 2014–2024, Medicaid in Minnesota increased from serving 728,000 to 1,106,000. That’s a 52% increase, while the population growth during that time was just 3%. Why did Medicaid grow seventeen times the growth in population?
This explosive growth is outside of the pandemic years, when the number rose to 1,336,000 as eligibility eased and disenrollment was nearly impossible. Between 2023 and today, more than 230,000 Minnesotans were “kicked off” Medicaid as they lost eligibility when the pandemic emergency ended. Where did they all go? The uninsured number in Minnesota has not dramatically spiked. Why?
Last year, American Experiment’s Peter Nelson took a deep dive into those numbers. In “What the Medicaid Undercount reveals about “Medicaid Unwinding.” Nelson discovered that one-in-five enrollees was improperly enrolled, noting “around 70 percent of the increase in Medicaid enrollment from 2019-2022” were people who did not know they had Medicaid. They might have been enrolled in a private plan, Medicare, or simply thought they were uninsured.
This “undercount” increased from 5.8 million in 2018 to 18.5 million in 2022, an increase of 12.7 million, largely made up of people who were on Medicaid, but did not know it.
This has been an incredible benefit to the Medicaid Managed Care Organizations (MCOs) who manage Medicaid for most enrollees. Their net underwriting gain soared to $9.1 billion in 2021 and 2022, from around $1.5 billion in the preceding years.
The Kaiser Foundation released numbers showing that 170,000 Minnesotans would lose health insurance as a result of the GOP’s Big Beautiful Bill because of increased eligibility checks for Medicaid.
If these folks live in another state, are already covered, make too much money, or are dead, Minnesotans do not want them on Medicaid.