The COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on the nation’s health care system, but one silver lining was the guarantee of continuous coverage for people insured by Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), two state and federally funded insurance programs for people with lower incomes.ĭuring the pandemic, the federal government provided extra funding to states under the Medicaid Continuous Enrollment Provision to help them enroll eligible people in Medicaid and CHIP and allow those patients to keep their insurance without having to reenroll every year. “And it’s frayed.” A silver lining to the pandemic “We’re the safety net for medicine,” Shoemaker says. Those newly uninsured people could wind up seeking uncompensated care in the emergency department because they no longer have anywhere else to go. Millions of people nationwide could lose Medicaid coverage over the next few months with the end of the federal public health emergency, which becomes official on May 11. They are about to face yet another challenge.
It wasn’t long before emergency departments were filling up again, though - this time with people who were sicker, likely from waiting to seek treatment, Shoemaker says.Įmergency physicians and their fellow frontline clinicians have experienced a difficult few years, from the financial impacts of lower volumes early in the pandemic, to the burnout associated with the high volumes of the pandemic peaks, to the current challenges posed by nursing shortages leading to patients staying in the emergency department longer before hospital admission. “We were concerned patients weren’t coming in when they should be,” recalls Jamie Shoemaker, MD, a partner with Elite Emergency Physicians, Inc., based in Indiana, and a member of the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) board. In the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, before vaccines and therapies were available, hospital emergency departments were suddenly empty as people avoided them for fear of exposure to the virus.
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