AUSTIN, Texas — Texas is leading the nation with the number of adults and children who lost Medicaid health coverage during the state’s unwinding process. Over two million people were unenrolled in the last year because of the end of federal coverage, that Texas chose to not supplement. 

As a result, hospital bills could rise to cover the uninsured. 

“If we have a high percentage that can’t pay in hospital ultimately it’s going to affect everyone through their health insurance premiums,” said Stephen Love, president and CEO of the Dallas-Fort Worth Hospital Council. 

Texans who lost Medicaid were determined ineligible or removed for procedural reasons. That happens when the state can’t locate someone to verify reenrollment or doesn’t have enough information to determine if someone is eligible. 

However, federal law requires states to attempt to use data already available to determine eligibility. 

“States usually have this set up where there are certain groups of folks, broad kind of buckets, where they think they’re going to have enough information based on those systems to know whether they can do this and groups where they don’t,” said Laura Dague, a Public Service and Administration professor at Texas A&M University. 

Texas Health and Human Services says Medicaid enrollment numbers are in line with the department’s projections, and what they expected the dis-enrollment would be at this time. But some experts say more people should’ve been re-enrolled. 

“Texas decided to go through this Medicaid unwinding process pretty quickly. We could’ve taken longer. Other states have chosen to extend the amount of time to make sure that everybody that was still eligible was able to stay on,” said Brittney Taylor-Ross, a senior policy analyst at Every Texan. 

While the state works to review Medicaid eligibility, other social services have been delayed. 

“Mid-April, we were looking at about 67,000 SNAP applications that were sitting in the backlog,” said Taylor-Ross. 

The effect of the people losing coverage could trickle into other aspects of the state. 

“If you’ve got people that are missing working, calling in sick, etcetera it’s going to raise other type of workforce cost for employers,” said Love.

Texas HHS expects Medicaid enrollment numbers to continue to fluctuate as they complete the redetermination process. They’ve released their move up-to-date figures of their Medicaid unwinding effort on their End of Continuous Medicaid Coverage dashboard.