Georgia Medicaid enrollment up at least 10.2% since COVID hit; 453,000 would gain coverage via expansion

Georgia

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, Georgia isn't among them, though I've estimated January enrollment based on CMS's just-released Monthly Medicaid & Chip report (which use a slightly different methodology than the MBES reports).

Georgia is one of 12 states which still hasn't expanded Medicaid eligibility under the ACA (13 if you include Missouri, whose voters expanded the program last year...but which the state legislature refuses to fund).

Georgia's non-ACA Medicaid enrollment slowly grew from around 1.7 million to 2.0 million enrollees from 2014 - 2020...until the COVID pandemic hit in early 2020. Since then, it's increased by at least 10.2% (likely considerably more from February - June 2021).

In addition, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, there's 453,000 uninsured Georgians who would become newly eligible if the state were to expand Medicaid under the ACA, including 269,000 currently caught in the "Medicaid Gap" (those who earn less than 100% of the Federal Poverty Level, thus disqualifying them for ACA exchange subsidies either) and another 184,000 uninsured who qualify for a subsidized private healthcare policy but who haven't enrolled in one so far.

In addition, KFF estimates around 37,000 uninsured FL residents who are already eligible for the program but who haven't signed up as of yet.

It's also important to note that there's also around 220,000 GA residents currently enrolled in heavily-subsidized ACA exchange plans who would be shifted over to Medicaid instead if the state expanded the program, for a total of up to 673,000 who could potentially end up in the program.

Georgia has just over 10.7 million residents according to the 2020 U.S. Census. As of January 2021, around 2.25 million of them were enrolled in Medicaid, or 21.0% of the state population.

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