Texas: Medicaid enrollment up 22% since COVID hit; 1.43 MILLION would gain coverage via #ACA expansion

I've once again relaunched my project from last fall to track Medicaid enrollment (both standard and expansion alike) on a monthly basis for every state dating back to the ACA being signed into law.

For the various enrollment data, I'm using data from Medicaid.gov's Medicaid Enrollment Data Collected Through MBES reports. Unfortunately, they've only published enrollment data through December 2020. In most states I've been able to get more recent enrollment data from state websites and other sources. I'm using estimates based on raw data from the Texas Dept. of Health & Human Services for January 2021 and beyond.

Texas is one of 12 states which still hasn't expanded Medicaid eligibility under the ACA (13 if you include Missouri, whose voters expanded the program last year...but which the state legislature refuses to fund)...and by far the largest.

Non-ACA Medicaid enrollment in Texas hovered between 4.2 - 4.4 million people from 2015 - 2020...but since the COVID pandemic hit in early 2020, it's increased by 22%.

In addition, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a whopping 1.43 MILLION uninsured Texans would become newly eligible if the state were to expand Medicaid under the ACA, including 771,000 currently caught in the "Medicaid Gap" (those who earn less than 100% of the Federal Poverty Level, thus disqualifying them for ACA exchange subsidies either) and another 662,000 uninsured who qualify for a subsidized private healthcare policy but who haven't enrolled in one so far.

In addition, KFF estimates around 101,000 uninsured TX residents who are already eligible for the program but who haven't signed up as of yet.

Texas has around 29.15 million residents according to the 2020 U.S. Census. As of March 2021, around 5.06 million of them were enrolled in Medicaid, or 17.4% of the state population.