Judge Orders Health Officials to Stop Sharing Some Medicaid Data With Immigration Authorities

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) must stop sharing some Medicaid data with immigration officials, a federal judge has ruled.
U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria said on Aug. 12 that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), a component of HHS, failed to “carry out a reasoned decisionmaking process” before deciding to share the data with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
“To be sure, the Administration has made clear, through a series of Executive Orders and elsewhere, that immigration enforcement will become a higher priority in general,” he wrote.
“But using CMS data about Medicaid patients for immigration enforcement involves unique policy tradeoffs. As shown by the evidence presented by the states, using CMS data for immigration enforcement threatens to significantly disrupt the operation of Medicaid—a program that Congress has deemed critical for the provision of health coverage to the nation’s most vulnerable residents.”…