Musk/Trump Admin posts their claimed Nov 2024 Medicare enrollment data

A couple of weeks ago I expressed concern that the Musk/Trump Admin was several weeks late with publishing the latest monthly enrollment reports for Medicare, Medicaid & the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP).

Given that these reports have been posted on or around the first of the month for the past several years (including during the 1st Trump Admin), and especially given how much historic medical, heatlhcare & other types of data & information Musk/Trump have been furiously purging from federal government websites & data archives in their first month or so in power, this is an extremely understandable concern.

This morning, however, I'm (cautiously) pleased to report that CMS has, after a month-long delay, just published updated enrollment data for Medicare, adding both October & November 2024 to the data archive (Medicaid/CHIP, which is usually updated the same day as Medicare, still hasn't been updated as of this writing; it still has October 2024 as the most recent monthly enrollment report).

So, the good news is that it looks like the Musk/Trump Admin will continue to post updated enrollment data, at least for now.

According to the new data:

• Total Medicare beneficiaries are up to 68.23 million (up 138K since September)
• Traditional/FFM Medicare beneficiaries are at 33.82 million (up 38K)
• Medicare Advantage beneficiaries reached 34.4K (up 100K)
• 11.97 million Medicare enrollees were "Dual Eligibles"...that is, enrolled in both Medicare and Medicaid.

Of course, whether this updated data is accurate or not is a different question...but at least in this initial report, I'm not seeing any obvious red flags. It's unusual for traditional (FFS) Medicare enrollment to increase at all, as it's been on a steady downward trend as Med Advantage has grown in popularity for over a decade now, but it's not unprecedented, and I don't see anything in the 2-month changes which leap out at me:

Over the past decade, Medicare Advantage enrollment has increased from less than 30% of all Medicare enrollment to over 50%.

Obviously whether this is a good or bad thing depends on your perspective, but unless there are significant policy changes to one or both, it's pretty much inevitable.

It's also worth noting that, given the Musk/Trump Admin's obsession with erasing any reference or data regarding gender, race or ethnicity, this first Medicare enrollment report still includes a breakout of those three things:

Maybe they haven't gotten to wiping that data out yet, or maybe the powers that be haven't noticed yet. We'll see what happens going forward.