Eleven* Years of #ACA Medicaid Expansion in One Image

Back in February I posted a colorful graph which showed the progress of ACA Medicaid Expansion from January 2014 through June 2023.

The data comes from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services quarterly Medicaid Budget & Expenditure System reports. Unfortunately, the MBES reports only ran through June of last year, so it was missing the last half of the year...which is pretty important since that's when the drop in Medicaid coverage due to the ongoing Unwinding process really started to kick in.

Fortunately, CMS recently updated the MBES data to include the third quarter of 2023, bringing Medicaid enrollment *up through September. It's still 8 months out of date but it's better than nothing.

Note: Medicaid expansion enrollment actually peaked in May 2023 at just shy of 24.8 million, but the graph below only includes 6-month increments (January/June).

As of September 2023, MBES put Medicaid expansion enrollment at 23,225,220 nationally.

No further analysis or comment here; I just think this is a pretty cool graphic...and keep in mind that most of the people represented here would have been utterly screwed from early 2020 - early 2023 without the Affordable Care Act being in place when the pandemic hit.

Click the image for a higher-resolution version; the states are listed on the right-hand side, though they might be difficult to make out (also note that Guam, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands also have a number of ACA expansion enrollees shown):