Prioritizing Justice-Involved Individuals as the Public Health Emergency Ends

At the start of the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency (PHE), government mandates were put in place to ensure that Americans were not without continuous access to medical care. Now, as organizations prepare for the formal end of the PHE, the focus should still be on people and continuity of care.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, between 5.3 million and 14.2 million people (and some sources predict even more) could lose Medicaid coverage following the end of the PHE and continuous enrollment requirement. This has the potential to negatively impact the agencies and organizations trying to get through redeterminations and eligibility and highlights the importance of ensuring the most vulnerable people receive proper coverage for their health needs after their release.

The pending unwinding of the PHE will require all Medicaid enrollees to have their coverage redetermined over the next 12 months. The unwinding event will remove or suspend coverage for justice-involved people (people who are or have been incarcerated), but this coverage should resume once the individual is released.

Upon their release, individuals who are or have been incarcerated experience a disproportionately high number of health risks in comparison to the general population. Incarcerated individuals are: 

• Three times more likely to have a mental illness and four times more likely to have substance abuse issues;

• Approximately three times more likely to have HIV/AIDS;

• More than seven times more likely to have Hepatitis C (HCV) and make up an estimated one third of all HCV cases in the U.S.;

• At risk for higher rates of morbidity and mortality overall, including 12 times the risk of opioid overdose death during the first two weeks of reentry.

Without the proper access to healthcare after release from prison or jail, studies show that untreated health conditions have been linked to increased rates of recidivism, which keeps justice-involved individuals trapped in a never-ending cycle of “crime-conviction-incarceration-release.” 

The Equifax Incarceration Intelligence™ solution helps state agencies and MCOs to focus on a Medicaid population that are not only high-utilizers but also high-cost care members. Providing data to these organizations enables proper, quality, and timely care for this population segment, which makes a positive impact not only on an individual level, but also across all communities nationwide by decreasing the risk of repeat crime and recidivism.

To learn more about how Equifax Workforce Solutions provides solutions to help agencies ensure continuity of benefits and make a way for successful post-incarceration transitions through our Incarceration Intelligence solution powered by TotalVerify from Equifax, visit us here.