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Apr 12 2024 KFF Health News

Nearly a quarter of adults disenrolled from Medicaid in the past year say they are now uninsured, according to a survey released Friday that details how tens of millions of Americans struggled to retain coverage in the government insurance program for low-income people after pandemic-era protections began expiring last spring.

The first national survey of adults whose Medicaid eligibility was reviewed during the unwinding found nearly half of people who lost their government coverage signed back up weeks or months later — suggesting they should never have been dropped in the first place.

While 23% reported being uninsured, an additional 28% found other coverage — through an employer, Medicare, the Affordable Care Act's insurance marketplace, or health care for members of the military, the survey by KFF found.

"Twenty-three percent is a striking number especially when you think about the number of people who lost Medicaid coverage," said Chima Ndumele, an associate professor of health policy at the Yale University School of Public Health.

Going without insurance even for a short period of time can lead people to delay seeking care and leave them at financial risk when they do.

Seven in 10 adults who were disenrolled during the unwinding process say they became uninsured at least temporarily when they lost their Medicaid coverage.

Adrienne Hamar, 49, of Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, said she struggled to enroll in an Affordable Care Act marketplace plan this winter after the state informed her that she and her two children no longer qualified for Medicaid. They had been enrolled since 2020. She said phone lines were busy at the state's marketplace and she couldn't complete the process online.

Hamar, who works as a home health aide, and her children were uninsured in March. But since April 1, they've been enrolled in a marketplace plan that, with the help of government subsidies, costs $50 a month for the family.

"I was very relieved," she said. Unsure of their insurance status, Hamar said, her 23-year-old daughter delayed getting a dental checkup.

Hamar's struggles were common, the survey found.

Of adults enrolled in Medicaid before the unwinding, about 35% who tried to renew their coverage described the process as difficult, and about 48% said it was at least somewhat stressful.

About 56% of those disenrolled say they skipped or delayed care or prescriptions while attempting to renew their Medicaid coverage.

"People's current insurance status is likely to be very much in flux, and we would expect at least some of the people who say they are currently uninsured to reenroll in Medicaid — many say they are still trying — or enroll in other coverage within a short period of time," said Jennifer Tolbert, a co-author of the KFF report and the director of KFF's State Health Reform and Data Program. Related StoriesBiden is right about $35 insulin cap but exaggerates prior costs for Medicare enrolleesPrenatal cannabis use disorder linked to increased risk of neurodevelopmental disorders in offspringLurie Children's Hospital administers first gene therapy for Duchenne muscular dystrophy in Illinois

The survey didn't include children, and the KFF researchers said their findings therefore couldn't be extrapolated to determine how the Medicaid unwinding has affected the overall U.S. uninsured rate, which hit a record low of 7.7% in early 2023. Nearly half of enrollees in Medicaid and the related Children's Health Insurance Program are children.

The unwinding, in which states are reassessing eligibility for Medicaid among millions of Americans who enrolled before or during the pandemic and dropping those who no longer qualify or did not complete the renewal process, won't be completed until later this year. Enrollment in Medicaid and CHIP grew to a record of nearly 94.5 million in April of last year, three years after the federal government prohibited states from cutting people from their rolls during the covid-19 public health emergency.

Nationally, states have disenrolled about 20 million people from Medicaid in the past year, most of them for procedural reasons such as failure to submit required paperwork. That number is expected to grow, as states have a few more months to redetermine enrollees' eligibility.

Among adults who had Medicaid prior to the start of the unwinding, 83% retained their coverage or reenrolled, while 8% found other insurance and 8% were uninsured. The share left uninsured was larger in states that have not expanded Medicaid under the ACA (17%) than in states that have (6%). Forty states have expanded Medicaid to cover everyone with an income under 138% of the federal poverty rate, or $31,200 for a family of four this year.

The KFF survey found that nearly 1 in 3 disenrolled adults discovered only when they sought health care — such as going to a doctor or a pharmacy — that they had been dropped from Medicaid.

Indira Navas of Miami found out that her 6-year-old son, Andres, had been disenrolled from Florida's Medicaid program when she took him to a doctor appointment in March. She had scheduled Andres' appointment months in advance and is frustrated that he remains uninsured and his therapy for anxiety and hyperactivity has been disrupted.

Navas said the state could not explain why her 12-year-old daughter, Camila, remained covered by Medicaid even though the children live in the same household with their parents.

"It doesn't make sense that they would cover one of my children and not the other," she said.

Kate McEvoy, executive director of the National Association of Medicaid Directors, said the sheer volume of millions of people being redetermined for eligibility has overwhelmed some state call centers trying to support enrollees.

She said states have tried many ways to communicate with enrollees, including through public outreach campaigns, text, email, and apps. "Until the moment your coverage is at stake, it's hard to penetrate people's busy lives," she said.

The KFF survey, of 1,227 adults who had Medicaid coverage in early 2023 prior to the start of the unwinding on April 1, 2023, was conducted between Feb. 15, 2024, and March 11, 2024. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 4 percentage points.

KFF Health News correspondent Daniel Chang contributed to this article.

This article was reprinted from khn.org, a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF – the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism. Source:

KFF Health News

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US

‘It’s a war’: Meet the volunteers leading the fight against Trump’s ICE raids

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July 14, 2025

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'It's a war': Meet the volunteers leading the fight against Trump's ICE raids

It’s 5.30am, but the car park outside a laundrette in south central Los Angeles is already bustling.

A woman is setting up a stand selling tacos on the pavement and the sun is beginning to rise behind the palm trees.

A group of seven women and two men are gathered in a circle, most wearing khaki green t-shirts.

The leader, a man named Francisco “Chavo” Romero, begins by asking how everyone is feeling. “Angry,” a few of them respond. “Proud of the community for pushing back,” says another.

Ron, a high school history teacher, issues a rallying cry. “This is like Vietnam,” he says. “We’re taking losses, but in the end we’re going to win. It’s a war.”

Francisco “Chavo” Romero, Union del Barrio, a volunteer group, attempting to spot immigration officials
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Francisco ‘Chavo’ Romero leads a volunteer group, attempting to warn people ahead of ICE raids

This is what the resistance against Donald Trump’s immigration policy looks like here. In the past month, immigration and customs enforcement agents – known as ICE – have intensified their raids on homes and workplaces across Los Angeles.

Since the beginning of June, nearly 2,800 undocumented immigrants have been arrested in the city, according to the Department of Homeland Security. The previous monthly high was just over 850 arrests in May this year.

Federal immigration agents toss tear gas at protesters during a raid in the agriculture area of Camarillo, Calif
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Police use tear gas against protesters, angry at a recent immigration raid at a farm in Camarillo, California. Pic: AP

Videos have circulated online of people being tackled to the ground in the car park of DIY shops, in car washes and outside homes. The videos have prompted outrage, protests and a fightback.

“Chavo” and Ron belong to a group of organised volunteers called Union del Barrio. Every morning, a group of them meet, mostly in areas which have high immigrant populations.

The day I meet them, they’re in an area of LA which is heavily Latino. Armed with walkie talkies to communicate with each other, megaphones to warn the community and leaflets to raise awareness they set out in cars in different directions.

Ron, a high school history teacher, driving in LA trying to spot ICE officials
Image:
A volunteer from Union del Barrio shows Sky’s Martha Kelner how they try to stay one step ahead of ICE agents

They’re looking for cars used by ICE agents to monitor “targets”.

“That vehicle looks a little suspicious,” says Ron, pointing out a white SUV with blacked-out windows, “but there’s nobody in it”.

An elderly Latino man is standing on a street corner, cutting fruit to sell at his stall. “He’s the exact target that they’re looking for,” Ron says. “That’s what they’re doing now. The low-hanging fruit, the easy victim. And so that is proving to be more successful for their quotas.”

Man selling fruit on a street in LA
Image:
This man, selling fruit on a street corner in LA, is a potential target of immigration agents

In the end, it turns out to be a quiet morning in this part of LA, no brewing immigration operations. But elsewhere in the city, dawn raids are happening.

ICE agents are under pressure from the White House to boost their deportation numbers in line with Donald Trump’s campaign promise to crack down on illegal immigration.

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In June, tear gas and rubber bullets were fired at protestors demonstrating against immigration raids

Maria’s husband Javier was one of those arrested in LA. He came to the United States from Mexico when he was 19 and is now 58.

The couple have three grown-up children and two grandchildren. But Javier’s work permit expired two years ago, according to Maria and so he was living here illegally.

Maria whose husband Javier was one of those arrested in Los Angeles
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Maria’s husband Javier was arrested after his work permit expired

She shows me a video taken last month when Javier was at work at a car wash in Pomona, an area of LA. He is being handcuffed and arrested by armed and masked ICE agents, forced into a car. He is now being held at a detention centre two hours away.

“I know they’re doing their job,” she says, “but it’s like, ‘you don’t have to do it like that.’ Getting them and, you know, forcing people and pushing them down on the ground. They’re not animals.”

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US troops accused of ‘political stunt’ after park raid

Maria wipes away tears as she explains the impact of his absence for the past four weeks. “It’s been so hard without him,” she says. “You feel alone when you get used to somebody and he’s not there any more. We’ve never been apart for as long as this.”

The family have a lawyer and is appealing for him to remain in the US, but Maria fears he will be sent back to Mexico or even a third country.

Maria's husband Javier was one of those arrested in Los Angeles.
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Maria fears her husband, who has lived in the US for nearly 40 years, will be sent back to Mexico

“I don’t know what to say to my grandkids because the oldest one, who is five was very attached to his papas, as he calls him. And he’s asking me, ‘When is papa coming home?’ and I don’t know what to say. He’s not a criminal.”

The fear in immigrant communities can be measured by the empty restaurant booths and streets that are far quieter than usual.

A sign asking people to report sightings of ICE officials in LA
Image:
People in LA are being asked to report sightings of ICE officials so others can be warned

I meet Soledad at the Mexican restaurant she owns in Hollywood. When I arrive, she’s watching the local news on the TV as yet another raid unfolds at a nearby farm.

She’s shaking her head as ICE agents face off with protesters and military helicopters hover overhead. “I am scared. I am very scared,” she says.

All of her eight employees are undocumented, and four of them are too scared to come into work, she says, in case they get arrested. The process to get papers, she says, is too long and too expensive.

Read more from Sky News:
Farmer first to die during ICE raids
Trump warns comic over citizenship

Soledad, who owns a Mexican restaurant in Hollywood
Image:
Soledad, who owns a Mexican restaurant, plans to hide her illegal workers if immigration officials arrive

“They call me and tell me they are too afraid to come in because immigration is around,” she says.

“I have to work double shifts to be able to make up for their hours, and yes, I am very desperate, and sometimes I cry… We have no sales, and no money to pay their wages.”

There is just one woman eating fajitas at a booth, where there would usually be a lunchtime rush. People are chilled by the raids.

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Soledad says she plans to hide her illegal workers if immigration officials arrive.

“I’ve told them, get inside the fridge, hide behind the stove, climb up where we have a space to store boxes, do not run because they will hunt you down.”

The White House says they’re protecting the country from criminals. ICE agents have been shot at while carrying out operations, their work becoming more dangerous by the day.

The tension here is ratcheting up. Deportation numbers are rising too. But the order from Donald Trump is to arrest even more people living here illegally.

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Technology

Nvidia CEO downplays U.S. fears that China’s military will use his firm’s chips

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July 14, 2025

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Nvidia CEO downplays U.S. fears that China's military will use his firm's chips

Co-founder and chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., Jensen Huang attends the 9th edition of the VivaTech trade show in Paris on June 11, 2025.

Chesnot | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has downplayed U.S. fears that his firm’s chips will aid the Chinese military, days ahead of another trip to the country as he attempts to walk a tightrope between Washington and Beijing. 

In an interview with CNN aired Sunday, Huang said “we don’t have to worry about” China’s military using U.S.-made technology because “they simply can’t rely on it.”

“It could be limited at any time; not to mention, there’s plenty of computing capacity in China already,” Huang said. “They don’t need Nvidia’s chips, certainly, or American tech stacks in order to build their military,” he added.

The comments were made in reference to years of bipartisan U.S. policy that placed restrictions on semiconductor companies, prohibiting them from selling their most advanced artificial intelligence chips to clients in China. 

Huang also repeated past criticisms of the policies, arguing that the tactic of export controls has been counterproductive to the ultimate goal of U.S. tech leadership. 

“We want the American tech stack to be the global standard … in order for us to do that, we have to be in search of all the AI developers in the world,” Huang said, adding that half of the world’s AI developers are in China. 

‘The Nvidia Way’ author Tae Kim: Jensen Huang always positions Nvidia ahead of the next big trend

That means for America to be an AI leader, U.S. technology has to be available to all markets, including China, he added.

Washington’s latest restrictions on Nvidia’s sales to China were implemented in April and are expected to result in billions in losses for the company. In May, Huang said chip restrictions had already cut Nvidia’s China market share nearly in half.

Huang’s CNN interview came just days before he travels to China for his second trip to the country this year, and as Nvidia is reportedly working on another chip that is compliant with the latest export controls.

Last week, the Nvidia CEO met with U.S. President Donald Trump, and was warned by U.S. lawmakers not to meet with companies connected to China’s military or intelligence bodies, or entities named on America’s restricted export list.

According to Daniel Newman, CEO of tech advisory firm The Futurum Group, Huang’s CNN interview exemplifies how Huang has been threading a needle between Washington and Beijing as it tries to maintain maximum market access.

“He needs to walk a proverbial tightrope to make sure that he doesn’t rattle the Trump administration,” Newman said, adding that he also wants to be in a position for China to invest in Nvidia technology if and when the policy provides a better climate to do so.

But that’s not to say that his downplaying of Washington’s concerns is valid, according to Newman. “I think it’s hard to completely accept the idea that China couldn’t use Nvidia’s most advanced technologies for military use.”

He added that he would expect Nvidia’s technology to be at the core of any country’s AI training, including for use in the development of advanced weaponry. 

A U.S. official told Reuters last month that China’s large language model startup DeepSeek — which says it used Nvidia chips to train its models — was supporting China’s military and intelligence operations. 

On Sunday, Huang acknowledged there were concerns about DeepSeek’s open-source R1 reasoning model being trained in China but said that there was no evidence that it presents dangers for that reason alone.

Huang complimented the R1 reasoning model, calling it “revolutionary,” and said its open-source nature has empowered startup companies, new industries, and countries to be able to engage in AI. 

“The fact of the matter is, [China and the U.S.] are competitors, but we are highly interdependent, and to the extent that we can compete and both aspire to win, it is fine to respect our competitors,” he concluded. 

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Environment

Musk will ask Tesla shareholders to vote on bailout for twitter/xAI

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3 hours ago

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July 14, 2025

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Musk will ask Tesla shareholders to vote on bailout for twitter/xAI

Tesla shareholders will vote on whether to invest into xAI, Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s private company, according to a post by Musk on twitter today.

Elon Musk is not just the CEO of Tesla, the electric car company that you may have heard about from time to time in Electrek’s coverage, but several other companies as well. And, famously, Musk companies often share resources – there has been much talk of incorporating SpaceX technology into Tesla vehicles, and putting xAI/twitter’s “MechaHitler”…. er, I mean, “Grok”…. feature into Tesla cars, among other collaborations that have happened over his various companies’ histories.

And today, Musk made it official that he will seek greater collaboration between three of his companies: Tesla, xAI, and twitter, in the form of an investment into xAI by Tesla.

The situation is a little more complicated than that, though.

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Tesla is a public company, owned by shareholders. Musk is the largest shareholder, but only owns around 12% of the company himself.

This is a different situation than xAI, which is a private company, owned by Musk. While there are other investors, he can exercise much more direct control over the company, and doesn’t have to put big decisions up to a vote.

One of the recent decisions he made with xAI was to purchase twitter in March. You may say, “wait, I thought he bought twitter back in 2022?,” and you’d be correct. Musk purchased twitter for $44 billion in 2022, which was widely agreed to be far too high a price, and then rapidly saw the company’s valuation drop to under $10 billion.

Then, in March 2025, Musk had xAI purchase twitter in an all-stock deal, valuing twitter company at $45 billion – again, far too high of a valuation, but considering he purchased the company from himself, he could set the price at whatever he wanted.

The move was widely considered to be a bailout of twitter, and the numbers involved considered arbitrary, perhaps partially to help save face for Musk after he made one of the worst business deals of all time.

Now the two are the same entity, and it seems clear that he would like to bring Tesla into the fold, in some way or another.

Musk has already improperly used resources from Tesla, a public company, to boost xAI and twitter, his private companies. Last year, he gave up Tesla’s priority position for highly sought-after NVIDIA H100 GPUs, instead shipping those GPUs to xAI and twitter. Tesla could have used these GPUs for training its FSD/Robotaxi systems, which Musk has claimed is the most important thing to Tesla’s future, but instead graciously sent them to his other company that used them to, uh, train a bot to say Nazi stuff apparently.

xAI has also poached talent from Tesla, multiple times, showing how Musk is using Tesla as a farm team for his private company.

So it hasn’t been a secret that Musk would like to use public money to bail out his private companies, as he’s been setting the stage for for a while now.

Musk has previously “discussed” getting Tesla to invest in xAI in the past, but the idea was never made official until today, when Musk said that he will put the idea to a shareholder vote.

In response to one of his superfans asking for the the opportunity to waste money on an overvalued social media app (which would mark the third time it has been overpaid for in as many years), and the backend fueling “MechaHitler,” Musk said this:

Tesla traditionally holds its annual shareholder meeting around the middle of the year, so if it were a normal year, this shareholder vote might be imminent.

But it’s not a normal year, as just last week Tesla announced an exceptionally late shareholder meeting, pushing it back to November, the latest it has ever held the meeting.

This means that Musk will have around four months to campaign for this idea – something that he’ll perhaps have more time to do, now that he’s no longer cosplaying as a government official.

We don’t know what the structure of the deal might look like yet, but Musk has been clear in the past that he wants more shares in Tesla. After selling many of his shares in order to buy twitter, he later complained that he doesn’t feel comfortable having less than 25% of Tesla. Given that his recent xAI/twitter deal was an all-stock deal, Musk could attempt to fund any investment of Tesla into xAI via shares, giving himself more Tesla shares in exchange for the company gaining a portion of xAI. Though to get him to 25% voting shares in Tesla, that would require either an enormous valuation for xAI, a small valuation for Tesla, or purchasing a large percentage of xAI (or, perhaps, all three, given how much higher TSLA’s valuation is than xAI’s).

We may however have a hint as to how that vote will go, because the last time Musk campaigned for a clearly terrible idea, Tesla shareholders ate it up.

In mid-2024, Musk ended his yearslong absenteeism at Tesla in a flurry of activity, hoping to persuade enough shareholders to vote for his illegal $55B pay package.

That flurry involved firing 10% of the company (supposedly in order to save money – though Tesla’s earnings have dropped drastically since), including important leadership and successful teams, which caused chaos with Tesla’s projects. He also pushed back an all-important affordable car project (which we’ve still heard nothing about) and held Tesla’s AI projects hostage while shifting both resources and staff from Tesla to his private AI company, even as he claims that AI is the future of Tesla.

In the end, these bad decisions worked, and shareholders voted to give their bad CEO his $55B pay package, even though it was later ruled to still be illegal.

So it looks like we’ve got another campaign coming up, and if last time was any indication, expect some really bad decisions along the way. It worked last time, didn’t it?

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