Has the next phase of Musk/Trump's Memory Holing begun? Monthly Medicare/Medicaid/CHIP reports are late...

Tue, 02/25/2025 - 1:10pm

On January 19th, the day before the Musk/Trump Regime took office, I posted the following:

DON'T GET ME WRONG: I'm not saying that everything posted by HHS or CMS under the Trump 2.0 Administration will be bullshit. My guess is the vast majority of it will probably be reasonably accurate, at least for the first few months...if only because it will take awhile for whatever sycophants/grifters he puts in charge of those departments (likely antivaxxer nutjob RFK Jr. for HHS and grifter/snake oil salesman Dr. Oz for CMS) to purge their departments of career professionals and replace them with MAGA/Trump loyalists.

Even then, it's quite possible that some or even most reports will remain reasonably accurate, in some cases simply because Trump doesn't see any reason to cook those particular books; in other cases they may simply not be aware that some data is even being made publicly available.

Honestly, my biggest fear is that they'll simply stop publishing some of the critical data reports altogether in the name of "government efficiency" or whatever.

For years now, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has published monthly enrollment reports for Medicare, Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) at the end or beginning of the month. While these reports always lag behind the current data by a few months, they've been pretty consistent. For example:

The monthly Medicaid reports also include CHIP enrollment, and the monthly Medicare enrollment report has traditionally been released on the same day.

The October Medicaid/CHIP report was clearly pushed out as quickly as possible by the Biden Administration ahead of the incoming Musk/Trump Admin (the Biden Admin also went back and updated all of the prior monthly reports on January 15th as well, according to the Medicaid.Gov website archives).

However, the October Medicare report still hasn't been released as of this writing (Data.CMS.Gov still lists September as the most recent update; that came out on 12/27/24), and the November Medicaid/CHIP report hasn't come out as of yet either.

This means that it's been 41 days since CMS has updated the Medicaid/CHIP data and 60 days since they've updated the Medicare data.

As you can see, while the time between monthly updates varies, it's never gone more than 43 days between updates, an generally averages around every 30 days or so.

Now, it's entirely possible that CMS will publish the November Medicaid/CHIP report and/or the October Medicare report any day now, making me look like Chicken Little. Assuming they do, it's also quite possible that the enrollment data for both will be reasonably accurate. If both of these prove to be the case, I'll eat crow on this particular issue.

Stay tuned...