The Utah Department of Health & Human Services confirmed to FOX 13 News it has documented a $100-200 million budget shortfall in its Medicaid program.

“The deficit is significant,” Health & Human Services Commissioner Tracy Gruber told FOX 13 News in an interview Tuesday. “We want to reiterate that at this point, there have been no changes to Medicaid benefits and people should feel comfortable using Medicaid.”

But the budget gap is so big, the Utah State Legislature is likely to dip into rainy day funds to bail it out. The shortfall is a result of a series of factors: a lot of people were dropped off Medicaid as the COVID-19 public health emergency ended; health care costs have only increased since then; and a budget forecasting tool utilized by the Utah Department of Health & Human Services didn’t catch it.

“We did lose about 200,000 members in our Medicaid membership rolls after the public health emergency ended. So the question would be, if you lose that number of people, why would it cost so much? The people who remained on medicaid are what we would call ‘high utilizers,’” Gruber said.

There are about 318,000 Utahns on Medicaid rolls currently, according to DHHS. The total budget for Medicaid is about $5.6 billion in Utah with most of that federally covered. Utah’s share is about $500 million, so a $100-200 million shortfall is big.

Medicaid is a highly-scrutinized program politically. Asked how DHHS could miss any possible warning signs, Gruber replied: “There’s no mismanagement and you’re right, the Medicaid program is under a lot of scrutiny from auditors, from finance, but it is a complicated and complex program and its complexity has expanded. The unprecedented events were really hard to evaluate the impact of, and we aren’t the only state to have that challenge.”

Read the full story at Fox13Now.com.

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