Eligibility Confusion, Constant Changes in Medicaid Could Leave Children Behind: Chris Johnson, MBA

Cuts to Medicaid in the budget bill have led to experts highlighting the millions of people who could lose Medicaid coverage in a couple of years. Chris Johnson, MBA, CEO and founder of Bluebird Kids Health, spoke about how these changes to Medicaid could end up confusing parents and health care providers and leave children without the coverage that they need.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity; captions are auto-generated.

Transcript

What will the consequences of the Medicaid cuts be in children?

The biggest impact, I think, the direct impact will be those children who are impacted by eligibility or enrollment criteria. And there's really 2 ways that could impact. One is directly, there are some children who may lose eligibility for either Medicaid or CHIP [Children’s Health Insurance Program]. As I shared a minute ago, that number is large, but it's not a staggering number like you're seeing on the overall Medicaid impact. I think a lot more of those impacted individuals on Medicaid are the adult population. But the other area that I think could happen is there could be a lot of confusion. Especially if parents are covered by Medicaid, they don't necessarily know that the eligibility requirements for their children might be different from them, and so I think there's going to be a lot of confusion around what this means. I mean, even we as kind of health care experts are still trying to understand what this all means. And that means that for the lay person who's not thinking about health all the time, there's going to be a lot of confusion.

I think the second area will be the fact that there's just a lot of upheaval that this is going to cause. There's a lot of change. I think over the last 5 years, you saw this incredible expansion of Medicaid. Medicaid grew close to 80% between 2019 and 2023 so there's kind of a massive expansion, lots of new services. I think this bill is counteracting some of that probably unsustainable growth that occurred. But it's not just to Medicaid. It's going to be how are MCOs [managed care organizations] that are in the [Affordable Care Act] marketplace and in the Medicaid space, they're having impacts to their business across different service lines. They're going to be very distracted with lots of change. And so I worry a lot around just, are folks going to forget about children as we go through this? And part of my job is to make sure that children remain top of mind, not only for policy regulators, but also for a lot of our partners at MCOs, who we have great relationships with. But we need to make sure they keep having children top of mind.