Florida Medicaid enrollment up 27% since COVID hit; nearly 800,000 Floridians would gain coverage via 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.

For Florida's 2021 data, I'm using estimates based on raw data from the FL Agency for Health Care Administration.

Florida 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).

Florida's non-ACA Medicaid enrollment hovered between around 3.6 - 4.0 million for years until the COVID pandemic hit in early 2020. Since then, it's increased by nearly 27%.

In addition, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, there's 790,000 uninsured Floridians who would become newly eligible if the state were to expand Medicaid under the ACA, including 415,000 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 375,000 uninsured who qualify for a subsidized private healthcare policy but who haven't enrolled in one so far.

In addition, KFF estimates around 43,000 uninsured FL residents who are already eligible for the program but who haven't signed up as of yet.

Note: This article puts the total number of uninsured Floridians eligible for Medicaid if they expanded under the ACA a bit higher at 800,000. It's also important to note that there's also around 1.1 million FL residents currently enrolled in heavily-subsidized ACA exchange plans who would be shifted over to Medicaid instead if the state expanded the program.

Florida has just over 21.5 million residents according to the 2020 U.S. Census. As of May 2021, around 4.77 million of them were enrolled in Medicaid, or 22.1% of the state population.