The End of the Public Health Emergency

It’s official. The Biden Administration has announced the end of the Public Health Emergency (PHE) on May 11, 2023. It may not be the absolute end of COVID in our lives, but it is the end of the coordinated federal response.

Many Americans have moved on from the pandemic already. Large events are once again the norm, travel has resumed, and the virus is just a minor inconvenience in our otherwise normal lives.

But for seniors and people with disabilities, the PHE provided some essential protections. One of the elements of the PHE was increased federal funding for Medicaid. With these funds, states were able to maintain people on Medicaid throughout the pandemic, even if circumstances would usually require them to be removed from the program.

Now that the PHE is ending, county Medicaid offices will be redetermining all recipients’ eligibility for the program. Some advocates are concerned that people with disabilities will be unintentionally swept up in the purge if they are not aware of the necessity of their responses.

Others may not have spent the entirety of the COVID payments they received early in the pandemic. Social Security Income (SSI) and Medicaid have a resource limit of $2000, a limit that hasn’t increased since 1989. When the redeterminations begin, if people with disabilities have more than $2000 in their bank account, they could lose all their benefits.

Loss of Medicaid benefits can be catastrophic for people with disabilities. Medicaid doesn’t just pay for doctor’s appointments and hospital visits. It is the funding source for many of the programs that low-income seniors and people with disabilities rely upon to live in their homes and in the community.

Those Medicaid programs that support community-based services for people with disabilities also benefited from the PHE. Through temporary provisions related to the PHE, programs were able to implement some flexibility in the usual rules, allowing for things like virtual services and services provided by family members. In many states, those flexibilities will go away.

In Colorado, our state Medicaid office (the Department of Health Care Policy and Financing) was one of the first to implement the flexibilities allowed in the PHE, and they have gone through the process of making some of the more successful flexibilities permanent. HCPF is also working with regional agencies to ensure that communication to Medicaid members reduces the chance that anyone will be incorrectly removed from the program.

Finally, we also have to recognize that seniors and people with disabilities are among the most vulnerable to the worst outcomes from COVID. Catching the virus may be much worse than a minor inconvenience; it could be deadly.

I’m glad to see the impacts of this virus waning. I want to travel and go to events and not worry about whether I still have a clean mask in the car. But I also want to ensure that my friends and neighbors with disabilities are safe and healthy and can live rewarding lives. The PHE might be ending, but our responsibilities to each other are not.