When you apply for Medicaid, do you need to set a new application if?
Any answer to both questions depends on your state and county of residence, since both programs are the result of shared funding and administration between the Federal government and the respective states, whereas both Medicare and Social Security are Federal programs administered at the national level. It was only recently that all of the 50 states participated in Medicaid: Arizona was the final to join in 1982, although join is a misnomer for a privatized program thats supposed to be a public program. Then at the state level, the overhwhelming majority of states implement all social services at the county level, with varying levels of flexibility in program administration and structure within and between states. My home state of California refers to both programs with state-specific brands for reasons that have always eluded me: Medi-cal and Cal-Fresh. Medi-Cal was among the first in the country to expand using funding from the Affordable Care Act and I was a beneficiary of this personally as one of the first single, and childless participants accepted. As grateful as I was, it wasnt an honor at all from my perspective. Many states still do not extend eligibility to men or women who are not custodial parents and who are also not married, although there were ACA funds available to all states to expand the program to include this group. And, the news has recently been filled with discussion following Indianas decision to impose work conditions to ongoing eligibility to receive coverage under Medicaid. Food Stamps, or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), is funded by the Department of Agriculture, and the political function it serves is first, to boost prices (and farmer income) from staple food crops like corn and soy, and second, to feed people. Continuing with the example of California, the Cal-Fresh SNAP program does have an element of state-level involvement, mostly with infrastructure (all of the EBT cards are alike and the call service center for them is centralized in Sacramento) and branding and advertising, but the administration of the program is through the county social service agencies. Both are means tested, meaning the applicants must show that their income is below a certain threshold (making them needy or deserving) to qualify as beneficiaries. Because of this, in most counties (in most states) clients requesting assistance are almost always given both program applications at the first intake and the working assumption is that qualifying for one program de facto qualifies that new client for both. With some differences, this is also true for other means-tested programs like reduced or free school lunch, Head start and subsidized housing (if and where it is available). Tl;Dr: many counties create an in-house form for new clients to fill out that is structured to collect all the data they need to means test intake clienst for both Medicaid and SNAP simultaneously. Since your question was specific to needing to add an application to SNAP, which is offered in all 50 states, when you apply for Medicaid, which is also offered nationally, the only time this would be an issue is if you are a single, unmarried and non-custodial parent (or childless), like me, in one of the states that did not expand Medicaid to that population under the ACA, and those are: