Wisconsin down to 1.3M Medicaid recipients after nearly 400K deemed ineligible

(The Center Square) – Wisconsin was down to 1.3 million Medicaid and BadgerCare Plus enrollees in its June enrollment figures after reaching a pandemic-pause high of nearly 1.7 million, renewal numbers form the state’s Department of Health Services show.

The federal government paused Medicaid eligibility checks starting in March 2020 through the start of April 2023, when a yearlong unwinding process began.

The state had 1.2 million enrolled in BadgerCare Plus or Medicaid entering the pandemic in March 2020.

Of the 1.4 million enrollees who were reviewed for renewal between June 2023 and June 2024, 1 million retained coverage and nearly 394,000 lost coverage. Of those, more than 247,000 lost coverage due to procedural reasons for not completing the required paperwork for review and more than 146,000 were found to be ineligible during the process.

Those numbers are consistent with states across the country, where Medicaid departments have worked to communicate and find updated addresses for enrollees but ultimately do not know if enrollees failed to complete paperwork because they knew they would be ineligible or because they did not receive or follow through on communications they received.