Virginia: Medicaid expansion enrollment up 44% since COVID hit; total Medicaid up 23%

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 Virginia, I'm using adjusted raw data from the Virginia Dept. of Medical Assistance Services.

Virginia just expanded Medicaid under the ACA starting in 2019. The official CDC data shows a very strange, sudden drop-off in non-ACA Medicaid enrollment in July of that year, followed by a slow, gradual increase which has only accellerated since the COVID pandemic hit in early 2020. Since then, non-ACA Medicaid enrollment has gone up 14%, expansion enrollment has increased by over 44% and overall enrollmetn is up nearly 23% from pre-COVID days.

Virginia has 8,631,393 residents according to the 2020 U.S. Census. As of June 2020:

• around 1.666 million were enrolled in Medicaid overall, or 19.3% of the population
• around 1.115 million were enrolled in non-ACA Medicaid
• around 551,000 were enrolled in ACA Medicaid expansion

Add in the ~235,000 subsidized ACA exchange enrollees and that's around 786,000 Virginia residents who would lose healthcare coverage if the Supreme Court strikes down the Affordable Care Act, or 9.1% of the state population.