Nearly 25 million Americans have now lost Medicaid coverage because their home states are cutting off benefits provided to them during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The health organization KFF, formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation, has been monitoring the data with a tracker since May 3. The latest update shows that nearly 25 million people (26 percent of former Medicaid users) have “disenrolled” from Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) since August 1.

Medicaid recipients had been provided with “continuous health coverage” during the pandemic as the global health crisis took hold. This decision was made to ensure that no one would be excluded from the state health insurance plan due to application requirements or procedural issues. But since March 2023, states have been “revoking” continuous health coverage from beneficiaries, and millions of them have had their Medicaid benefits canceled because they did not meet eligibility criteria or because they missed application deadlines.

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In May, more than 340,000 Americans lost access to Medicaid, but that number has skyrocketed in just a few months. In July, about 370,000 people were dropped from the plan in a single state alone, when Alabama cut off health insurance for hundreds of thousands of residents.

According to KFF, a total of at least 24.8 million Americans have been discharged from Medicaid this month, based on states that reported Medicaid discontinuation numbers. Not all states have released the information, meaning the actual number could be higher.

By March 2023, 94 million people were enrolled in Medicaid/CHIP. This means that 26 percent of these people are no longer covered by the program due to disenrollment.

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About 54.3 million people (58 percent) have actually renewed their insurance, but 15 million people (16 percent of Medicaid users) still have not renewed their coverage, according to KFF figures.

Figures from KFF show that across all states for which data is available, 69 percent of people who lost coverage lost it for procedural reasons. That could mean “cases where people are dropped because they didn’t complete the renewal process. This can happen if the state has outdated contact information or because the insured doesn’t understand the renewal paperwork or otherwise doesn’t complete it within a certain time frame,” KFF said.

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The organization added: “The high disenrollment rates due to paperwork are concerning because many people who are disenrolled for these bureaucratic reasons may still be eligible for Medicaid insurance.”

Chris Fong, CEO of Smile Insurance Group, previously said Newsweek that patients “typically do not find out they have lost their Medicaid eligibility until they go to the doctor and are told they are uninsured. The best advice we can give if someone finds themselves in a situation where they have lost their Medicaid eligibility is to contact their state’s Medicaid agency immediately, find out the reasons for the loss, and reapply if they are still eligible.”