UPDATED: Michigan: ACA Medicaid Expansion hits 98% of total eligible (you read that correctly)

According to the state administration, there are roughly 477,000 Michiganders who qualify for Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. Well, guess what?

Healthy Michigan Plan Enrollment Statistics

Beneficiaries with Healthy Michigan Plan Coverage: 469,698
(Includes beneficiaries enrolled in health plans and beneficiaries not required to enroll in a health plan.)

*Statistics as of November 24, 2014 
*Updated every Monday at 3 p.m.

Now, obviously that 477K eligibility figure could be off (I had previously heard estimates as high as 500,000). The point is, the Medicaid expansion well in Michigan, along with many other states, is already running dry less than a year into the program (and in Michigan's case, less than 8 months in).

UPDATE: Hmmmm...ok, that's a first: According to today's update, the number enrolled in the Healthy Michigan program has actually dropped by around 8,500 people over the past week:

Healthy Michigan Plan Enrollment Statistics

Beneficiaries with Healthy Michigan Plan Coverage: 461,217
(Includes beneficiaries enrolled in health plans and beneficiaries not required to enroll in a health plan.)

*Statistics as of December 1, 2014

That's the first time since the program launched on April 1st that the number has gone down. This could be a case of a clerical error on the prior update, or it could simply mean that the program has effectively reached maximum enrollment, in which case it's perfectly reasonable to expect the enrollment number to fluctuate from week to week.

In addition, just as people dropping out of their private exchange policy isn't necessarily a bad thing, since it could simply mean that they got a job with benefits, aged into Medicare and so forth, the same could hold true here as well--generally speaking, people moving off of Medicaid because their situation improved to the point that they no longer qualify is a good thing for both the former recipient as well as the taxpayers.