Utah: Medicaid expansion enrollment up 76% since COVID hit; total Medicaid up 41%

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. Unfortunately, Rhode Island is among the few states where I haven't been able to get ahold of post-2020 data yet, even estimates.

There's not a lot of data available for 2021 in Utah yet, but I was able to get rough enrollment numbers for January & February from the Utah Dept. of Health. Utah only expanded Medcaid under the ACA starting in January of last year...just before the COVID pandemic hit, so the enrollment increase from the pre-COVID era is a bit misleading there. Having said that, even NON-expansion enrollment is up a stunning 35%, while ACA expansion enrollment has increased over 76% since last February, for an overall Medicaid surge of 41.4% so far.

Utah has 3,271,616 residents according to the 2020 U.S. Census. As of February 2021:

• around 424,000 were enrolled in Medicaid overall, or 13% of the population
• around 340,000 were enrolled in non-ACA Medicaid
• around 84,000 were enrolled in ACA Medicaid expansion

Add in the ~206,000 subsidized ACA exchange enrollees and that's around 290,000 Utahans who would lose healthcare coverage if the Supreme Court strikes down the Affordable Care Act, or 8.9% of the state population.