Louisiana: ACA Medicaid expansion hits 304,000

I know you're supposed to only use a brief paragraph or two, but this Sept. 19th AP/New Orleans Times-Picayune story only consists of five sentences anyway:

BATON ROUGE — The number of people who have signed up for Louisiana's Medicaid expansion program continues to grow, surpassing 300,000.

The Louisiana Department of Health released the latest figures Monday, saying more than 304,000 people are enrolled for the coverage that began July 1.

The department says nearly 12,000 Medicaid expansion enrollees have received preventive services through the government-finance insurance program so far, like cancer screenings, colonoscopies, and mammograms.

 The maximum number of Louisianans eligible for Medicaid expansion in the state is supposedly around 375,000. Enrollment began in June (though the program didn't actually go into effect until July), so that's 81% of the total enrolled within just 3 1/2 months.

As a reminder, about 188,000 of these enrollees were actually transferred over automatically from existing state-funded healthcare programs, so they might not technically be considered "newly" covered...except that those other programs didn't necessarily include anything close to comprehensive coverage, so this is still a massive upgrade for the enrollees. Even subtracting those, that's still 116,000 others who have actively enrolled in the program, still pretty impressive.