Living with severe ADHD can feel like driving a race car mind equipped with bicycle brakes, says clinical psychologist Lance Kelley. His team has recently witnessed too many crashes. During the last year, many kids who’d been able to manage their condition under his care have lost their Medicaid coverage and can no longer afford their medication. Quite a number of them subsequently skipped follow-up appointments, and for a while he didn’t know what had happened to them.
Then Kelley began to notice a disturbing pattern: some of these children and teens finally returned to his Waco clinic, no longer able to stay away. Some now required a higher level of care. Some had stopped going to school or ended up in handcuffs. “It’s the crash with no brakes,” Kelley says. That this is happening doesn’t particularly surprise him, given that “we systematically took the brakes off the car.”
At Waco Family Medicine, the community health center where Kelley supervises other behavioral health providers, the number of uninsured children seeking treatment increased by nearly threefold this winter compared to a year earlier. Since states began checking the eligibility of all Medicaid recipients in April 2023, following the end of a three-year pause on disenrolling anyone during the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 2 million Texans—and more than 21 million Americans—have been removed from the health insurance program. A majority of those dropped in Texas are children, and most were dropped for “procedural reasons,” denied not because it was determined they don’t qualify, but because of what amounts to paperwork issues. Nearly a million Texas children—about one in every eight kids in the state—have been kicked off Medicaid in the last year without ever being deemed ineligible, according to the latest state data.
Source: As Texas Drops Millions Off Medicaid, Safety Net Clinics Face a Crisis / Texas Monthly