Nearly halfway through a six-month process to redetermine Medicaid eligibility for hundreds of thousands of Arkansans, Department of Human Services officials said they believe estimates of where the population would land are close to projections.
DHS Secretary Kristi Putnam and Arkansas Medicaid Director Janet Mann appeared on this week’s edition of Capitol View and Talk Business & Politics. According to figures released by the agency in June, nearly 140,000 Arkansans have been disenrolled from the Medicaid expansion program, now known as ARHOME, or had their cases closed through regular program operations. New figures are expected to be released in mid-July.
“We do feel that they are tracking. We chose to do our extended category first with our regular renewals, because we had worked through the three-year pandemic on redeterminations, and if we determined that they would most likely be ineligible, we put them in the extended category. So we started with that, those categories first, to really work on right-sizing our population,” Mann said.