Alaska: 8,400 Alaskans have gained Medicaid coverage in the #COVID19 era thanks to #ACA expansion

Over at Xpostfactoid, my colleague Andrew Sprung has been doing a great job of tracking ACA Medicaid expansion enrollment growth since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic this past February/March at the macro (national) level, by looking at around a dozen states which have monthly reports available. He puts the overall enrollment growth rate at 23.6% from February thorugh October 2020.

Instead of replicating his work, I decided to take a closer look at individual states. The graph below shows how many Alaskans have been actively enrolled in our Medicaid expansion program (Healthy Michigan) every month since it was launched in September 2015:

Unfortunately, the AK HHS monthly report only includes the current month, so I had to use the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to dig up as many of the prior months as possible. Out of 79 months, I was able to locate reports for 21 of them; fortunately they're spaced out widely enough that the trendline is still pretty clear. I'm not sure what happened between August and November 2019 which caused enrollment to drop substantially after a slow, gradual incresase since it launched in 2015, but enrollment picked right back up again after that.

Since February 2020, Alaska's Medicaid expansion enrollment has increased by nearly 8,500 people and is now nearly 16% higher than it was when the COVID pandemic hit the U.S.

That's a total of nearly 62,000 Alaskans, plus another 15,000 enrolled in subsidized exchange plans, who would lose healthcare coverage if the ACA is struck down by the Trump/GOP lawsuit. That's 77,000 Alaskans, or 10.5% of the state's total population.