Alaska: Medicaid enrollment up 9.0% since COVID hit

As I noted recently, I've 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 total monthly Medicaid enrollment, the official Medicaid.gov monthly enrollment data is only available dating back to late 2013, and it's only current through November 2020. The Kaiser Family Foundation has also compiled the pre-2014 average enrollment for each state based on the 3rd quarter of 2013. In some states I've been able to find more recent enrollment data for December 2020 or later.

For Medicaid expansion enrollment, I'm using data from Medicaid.gov's Medicaid Enrollment Data Collected Through MBES reports. These are even more outdated...I can only get official numbers through June 2019 at the moment. Again, in some expansion states I've been able to get more recent enrollment data from state websites and other sources.

Today I'm presenting Alaska, which didn't begin Medicaid Expansion until September 2015. As you can see, both Alaska's expansion and non-expansion enrollment has increased steadily ever since. It plateaued for most of 2019, and non-ACA enrollment continued to remain mostly stable...but expansion enrollment has definitely increased noticeably since COVID reached The Last Frontier, up around 9% from February 2020 through last month.

Alaska has 733,000 residents, so 243,000 is over 33% of the entire population.