NEW YORK, July 10 (Xinhua) -- Medicaid, the publicly funded health insurance program designed to provide a safety net for low-income and disabled Americans, is unraveling at an alarming pace, a bad news for women, families, communities and the nation as a whole, said an opinion article published by The Hill on Sunday.

"As millions of people were losing their jobs or stepping away from paid work to care for their children during the pandemic, Medicaid was a lifeline," noted the article.

Between February 2020 and February 2023, the Medicaid rolls grew by nearly 23 million, thanks in part to provisions in the Families First Coronavirus Response Act that required states to keep people enrolled in coverage through the end of the public health emergency, according to the article.

Yet even before the public health emergency officially ended in May, Congress had given states the greenlight (via the Consolidated Appropriations Act) to start dropping people from Medicaid, said the article.

"Continuous enrollment rules ended on March 31, and it hasn't taken long for states to get to work disenrolling people," said the article. "By mid-June, more than a million people had already lost Medicaid benefits, and the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) estimates that approximately 8 million to 24 million could be disenrolled within 12 months."

Certain groups are more likely to lose coverage than others, as a result of barriers in the renewal process, according to KFF. These groups include people who have moved, immigrants and people with limited English proficiency, people with disabilities and older adults, it added.