ALERT! 2024 Medicaid Health Insurance Changes For Southwest Michigan

Health insurance is one of the most important things in our lives as it makes it easy to receive necessary treatments and services while not worrying about paying for an arm and a leg for them. Sometimes even with insurance, the prices for certain services or procedures can be astronomical and sometimes even too expensive. This is why for years there have been debates about whether people deserve affordable health care or if it should be a free market system like it is.

I'll tell you what, the free market system has somewhat been working but it does benefit those who are wealthy more than those who are not. I would like to say that I'm surprised but at the end of the day, that's how most systems in America are organized to run. Anyway, Medicaid was invented to ensure that everyone had access to health insurance and would be able to receive care from a physician when needed. Changes are being made to those Medicaid services in Southwest Michigan that will be going into effect before the end of 2024.

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Michigan is split into regions and Southwest Michigan is known as Region 8, which consists of the following counties:

• Berrien
• Branch
• Calhoun
• Cass
• Kalamazoo
• St Joseph
• Van Buren

Michigan's Department of Health and Human Services announced that they were able to obtain the first of 3 possible one year extensions for the Healthy Michigan Plan that is providing insurance to almost 2 million residents, but they did have the unfortunate news that there would be some changes.

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Those changes are directly affecting Southwest Michigan and Region 8 as the available services will differ than those from the previous year. Starting on October 1st of 2024, both Priority Health and Molina Health will no longer be providing services to Region 8, better known as Southwest Michigan.

Although Priority anfd Molina are leaving, Region 8 and Southwest Michigan will still receive services from the following providers:

• Aetna Health
• McLaren Health
• Meridian Health
• United Health

If you haven't already switched to another provider if need be or havent received information from the MDHHS about being insured under a new provider, you should reach out to MDHHS to ensure that you will remain insured when those services are dropped.