Washington State: Medicaid expansion enrollment up 28% since COVID hit; total Medicaid up 14%

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 Washington State, I'm using adjusted estimates based on raw data from the Washington State Health Care Authority.

Total Medicaid enrollment in Washington State (including ACA expansion) hovered around the 1.8 million mark for years, but dipped down to around 1.7 million prior to the COVID pandemic hitting. Since then, non-ACA enrollment has increased by 6.8% and the expansion population has gone up by 28.2%, for an overall increase of 13.7%.

Washington State has 7,705,281 residents according to the 2020 U.S. Census. As of April 2021:

• around 1.96 million were enrolled in Medicaid overall, or 25.4% of the population
• around 1.25 million were enrolled in non-ACA Medicaid
• around 711,000 were enrolled in ACA Medicaid expansion

Add in the ~130,000 subsidized ACA exchange enrollees and that's around 841,000 Washington State residents who would lose healthcare coverage if the Supreme Court strikes down the Affordable Care Act, or 10.9% of the state population.