With roughly five million Americans losing their Medicaid coverage since early 2025 as a result of the expiration of COVID-inspired eligibility expansions and the introduction of new, more stringent eligibility criteria, more people, faced with the need for health care and without their Medicaid safety net, are turning to cash to pay for the services they need.
According to new data, 7.6 percent of ER patients paid cash in the second quarter of 2026, up from 5.5 percent in 2022.
Meanwhile, the number of cash-paying, uninsured inpatients rose from 1.9 percent to 2.6 percent over the same period of time. At the same time, the percentage of inpatients covered by Medicaid fell from 13.2 percent to 11.7 percent.
The situation has been similar for births, with the number of self-paying patients up from 0.8 percent to 1.3 percent for births while Medicaid-covered births fell from 23.1 percent to 21.5 percent.
And the same has been true for primary care, with self-paying patients accounting for 1.9 percent of encounters, up from 1.8 percent, while Medicaid-covered encounters fell from 11.4 percent to 10.3 percent.
Learn more about these changes in who is paying for their own health care and the source of these figures from the Healthcare Dive article “Medicaid losses leave more patients paying cash, Epic finds.”