The United States may be in for a significant wave of evictions in a year or so, the unintended consequence of work to trim Medicaid rolls expanded during the Covid-19 public health emergency, according to new research from Georgia Tech's School of Public Policy.
The study, authored by Assistant Professor Ashley C. Bradford and recently published in Health Affairs, found that evictions in Tennessee rose 24.5 percent between 2005 and 2009 relative to other Southern states following the state's 2005 decision to remove approximately 190,000 people from its Medicaid rolls.
More than 16.4 million people nationwide - 86 times the Tennessee figure from 2005 - have already been taken off Medicaid as states react to a federal law requiring them to return to normal operations after years of expanded eligibility meant to blunt the impact of the pandemic, according to KFF Health News. As many as 24 million people could eventually lose access to Medicaid, according to the outlet.
However, Bradford warns that many aspects of health care administration and the housing market have changed since 2005, so it's hard to say whether that 24.5% figure in her paper will cleanly translate to the economic and policy environment of 2025. The populations involved in Tennessee's downsizing and the current national rollbacks are also different, adding more uncertainty.
"I think it's safe to say that we will see disruptions in housing, but we are not going to be able to see exactly how large those disruptions will be for a few years," Bradford said.
https://youtu.be/V7YkDwvWgzA?si=FwPKLP24paa6i4_A
Transformed Health Care and Housing Landscapes May Shift Impact
Among other things, where Tennessee's 2005 Medicaid changes primarily affected working-age childless adults, the researchers say that the current Medicaid rollback is expected to disproportionately affect immigrants and people with disabilities - populations whose budgets are often more sensitive to economic shocks like the loss of health insurance.
On the other hand, according to the researchers, the Affordable Care Act could also reduce financial shocks and evictions for some families. The program first offered health insurance plans - including low- and zero-premium options - in 2013, well after the period Bradford and her co-authors studied in Tennessee.
Another group expected to be affected, older adults, may be somewhat sheltered from evictions due to savings or Social Security income, according to Bradford and her co-authors, Mir M. Ali of the University of Maryland, College Park and Johanna Catherin Maclean of George Mason University.
