Medicaid Enrollment Grew ~30% Year-Over-Year

Medicaid expansion enrollment grew nearly 30% year-over-year in 19-state sample, Andrew Sprung, XPOSTFACTOID, March 17, 2021

An update on Medicaid expansion enrollment growth since the pandemic struck. Below is a sampling of 19 expansion states through January of this year, and 14 states through February.

Maintaining the assumption, explained here, “relatively slow growth in California would push the national total down by about 2.5 percentage points.” These tallies still point to year-over-year enrollment growth of approximately 30% from February 2020 to February 2021.

If that’s right, then Medicaid enrollment among those rendered eligible by ACA expansion criteria (adults with income up to 138% FPL) may exceed 19 million nationally and may be pushing 20 million.  Assuming the sampling of a bit more than a third of total expansion enrollment represents all expansion states more or less and again accounting for slower growth in California.

Totals in the bottom row are for the 14 states that have reported results through February 2021.

Expansion Medicaid enrollment in select states
 February 2020 through February 2021

As always, I attribute totals posted before the end of one given month to the prior month, so that a total posted on March 1 or later in the month and labeled “March” on the state site is presented here as “thru February.” For more context, see (again) this post, which links back to earlier discussions of method and assumptions.

And let’s pause to mentally update this year-end celebration of Medicaid — and the ACA Medicaid expansion in particular — as a safety net in the pandemic.