The pandemic-caused recession and a federal requirement that states keep Medicaid beneficiaries enrolled until the national emergency ends swelled the pool of people in the program by more than 9 million over the past year, according to a report released Thursday.

The latest figures show Medicaid enrollment grew from 71.3 million in February 2020, when the pandemic was beginning in the U.S., to 80.5 million in January, according to a KFF analysis of federal data. (KHN is an editorially independent program of KFF.)

That’s up from about 56 million in 2013, just before many states expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. And it’s double the 40 million enrolled in 2001.

Medicaid, once considered the ugly duckling compared with the politically powerful and popular Medicare program, now covers nearly 1 in 4 Americans. In New Mexico, the ratio is more than 1 in 3.

Together, Medicaid and Medicare cover 43% … Read the rest

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Dr. Leora Horwitz treats fewer and fewer covid patients at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City. Still, she thinks there are too many.

And they almost all have something in common.

“I’ve only had one patient who was vaccinated, and he was being treated for cancer with chemotherapy,” she said, reflecting recent research on the vaccines’ limited effectiveness for cancer patients. “Everyone else hasn’t been vaccinated.”

While taking care of those seriously ill with covid, she asks patients, with sympathy and respect: Why not get vaccinated? A few of them told the internist and hospital researcher that they’re concerned about vaccine safety. But mainly, she said, the responses break down into two groups: One comprises people who have been planning to get vaccinated but didn’t get around to it yet. The second highlights a disturbing deficiency in the pandemic response: those eager to get vaccinated but unable to … Read the rest

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For more than a year, public health officials have repeatedly told us that masks save lives. They’ve warned us to keep our distance from our neighbors, who’ve morphed into disease vectors before our eyes.

Now they are telling us that if we’re vaccinated, we no longer need to wear masks or physically distance ourselves in most cases — even indoors. To many people, myself included, this seems hard to reconcile with so many long months of masking and physical distancing and sacrificing our social lives for fear of covid-19.

What is an anxious, pandemic-weary (and wary) soul to do?

First, it’s important to stress that the dramatic rollback of mask-wearing and physical distancing recommended last month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — a policy California has adopted starting Tuesday as part of a broader reopening — applies only to people who have been fully vaccinated.

Even if … Read the rest

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