I'm writing because I'm genuinely worried about kids in our community going without health insurance — and the numbers coming out of Indiana right now are alarming. A Georgetown University report released this week shows Indiana lost 174,000 children from Medicaid between January and April 2025. That's a 20% drop, the largest rate of child coverage loss in the entire country. These aren't statistics — these are kids who may be skipping doctor visits, going without prescriptions, or landing in emergency rooms over things that could have been caught early. Many families appear to have been dropped not because they stopped qualifying, but because the redetermination process was confusing or the paperwork didn't reach them. There's also real evidence that immigrant families — including those with U.S.-citizen children who are fully eligible — are avoiding the system out of fear. Children are losing coverage they have every right to.
This is costing us in ways that aren't always obvious. Uninsured kids don't disappear — they end up in emergency rooms, which costs taxpayers far more than a routine checkup. Pediatricians and family doctors lose patients, and rural communities especially feel that strain. Indiana should be making it easier for eligible families to keep their kids covered, not harder. I'm asking you to act now to investigate why Indiana's disenrollment rate is so far out of step with the rest of the country, push the Family and Social Services Administration to fix the redetermination process, and make clear that eligible kids — regardless of their family's background — should not be losing coverage.
Please take immediate steps to hold Indiana's Medicaid agency accountable and make sure every eligible child gets their coverage restored.
