By Jasmine Laws

Copyright newsweek

Hundreds of thousands of American children have been removed from a health care plan in Florida in just over two years, according to data from KFF, a nonprofit health policy research and news organization.

About 700,000 children were disenrolled from Medicaid in the state as part of the unwinding process happening nationwide after Medicaid coverage was expanded following the COVID-19 pandemic.

Newsweek has contacted the Florida Department of Children and Families via email for comment.

Why It Matters

The growing number of uninsured children and adults in America is of great concern to many experts and lawmakers, who argue the rise will intensify pressure on emergency departments, increase costs long term and worsen health outcomes nationwide.

As children are also particularly reliant on Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), as new research has shown, it means that losing access to Medicaid could leave many without health insurance, harming their health and potentially affecting their education, which could have future implications.

A doctor speaks to a young boy in a hospital in this file photo.

What To Know

During the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. states expanded Medicaid coverage under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), triggering a rise in enrollment levels nationwide. States were mandated to keep most Medicaid enrollees in the program, even if their eligibility status changed, until March 2023.

At that stage, states could then start rolling recipients off the program, which has resulted in significant reductions in enrollment figures across the country over the last two years.

In Florida, there were 3,094,306 children covered by Medicaid in March 2023, before the unwinding process began. By June 2025, that number was 2,391,614, KFF data shows.

This marks a change of about 700,000, a decline of nearly one quarter of enrollees, which marks one of the steepest drops in child Medicaid enrollment across all states, behind Texas, Utah, Montana, Missouri and Alaska.

While some of these children may have access to other forms of health insurance—such as employer-sponsored health plans through their parents’ jobs—U.S. Census data shows the rate of uninsured children has increased by a half million since the unwinding process began, the highest figure in more than a decade, Tricia Brooks, professor at the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families, told Newsweek.

She added that trend will “likely continue,” as the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that over 11 million people will lose Medicaid as various aspects of President Donald Trump’s sweeping tax package, known as HR 1 or the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, are implemented.

States are also unwinding recipients at varying degrees, as the program is administered in states with “lots of flexibility within federal parameters,” Brooks said.

The policy and administrative choices states make “determine the level of red tape that families encounter in retaining coverage,” she said, meaning that fewer children and parents lost coverage in states that “put in the hard work to automate the redetermination process using reliable data, such as wage data, to verify ongoing eligibility.”

Also, “the extent to which states conducted multi-faceted communications campaigns, including social and news media, and engaged community partners in conducting outreach and assisting enrollees also had an impact on a state’s outcomes,” Brooks added.