Working With Community-Based Organizations and Individuals With Lived Experience to Support Continuity of Coverage at the End of the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency

As a condition of receiving enhanced federal funds under the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, states are maintaining continuous enrollment of all Medicaid enrollees, and many states have also paused Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) renewals and disenrollments.1,2,3 The continuous enrollment requirement will be discontinued when the COVID-19 public health emergency (PHE) ends and states resume the processing of pending renewals. The unwinding of the federal continuous coverage enrollment (from this point forward referred to as “unwinding”) will require states to redetermine Medicaid eligibility for nearly 85 million beneficiaries, which will result in a high risk of eligible individuals losing Medicaid or CHIP coverage due to administrative or procedural reasons.4