Musk/Trump Regime posts claimed Jan. 2025 Medicaid/CHIP enrollment report: 78.8M, down 0.9% from Dec. 2024

The Musk/Trump Regime has published an update to the official Medicaid/CHIP enrollment data:

January 2025 Key Findings

Medicaid and CHIP Enrollment

• In January 2025, 78.8 million individuals were enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP.
  • 71.4 million individuals were enrolled in Medicaid, and 7.3 million individuals were enrolled in CHIP.
  • 41.4 million adults were enrolled in Medicaid, and there were 37.4 million Medicaid child and CHIP enrollees.

Medicaid and CHIP Applications Received

• In January 2025, Medicaid, CHIP, Human Services agencies, and State-based Marketplaces received 3.0 million applications, or less than 1 percent more applications, as compared to December 2024.
  • The number of applications received has increased by 16 percent since January 2024 and increased by 77 percent since January 2023.

Total Medicaid/CHIP enrollment in January 2025 dropped about 0.9% from December 2024, or by just over 700,000 people.

The all-time high enrollment watermark for Medicaid/CHIP was in April 2023, when it officially hit 94.1 million Americans (95.7 million when you include the U.S. territories).

It's important to note that CMS actually has two different reports on Medicaid enrollment: The monthly Medicaid & CHIP Enrollment Trend Snapshot (referenced above) and the Medicaid Budget & Expenditure System (MBES).

Each type of report measures Medicaid enrollment a bit differently:

• The MBES report is 11 months out of date (through June 2024) while the Trend Snapshot is only 4 months outdated (through January 2025).

• The MBES count includes individuals enrolled in limited benefit plans and the Performance Indicator count does not include such individuals.

• The MBES data represents the count of unduplicated individuals enrolled in the state’s Medicaid program at any time during each month in the quarterly reporting period, while the Performance Indicator data captures the count of individuals enrolled on the last day of the month.

• The MBES count only includes individuals whose coverage is funded through Medicaid (title XIX of the Social Security Act), while the published Performance Indicator also includes individuals funded through CHIP (title XXI of the SSA).

• MBES and Performance Indicator data may be derived from different state systems.

• Retroactive state adjustments to MBES or Performance Indicator data may be in progress.

• States have likely generated MBES data and Performance Indicator data from state systems on different dates.

• The other major difference: The MBES reports include Medicaid enrollees in the U.S. territories: American Samoa, Guam, N. Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The MBES numbers for U.S. territories stood at 1.54 million Medicaid enrollees as of June 2024. If you add those to the Trend Snapshot total for the 50 states +DC, it comes in at 80.3 million as of December 2024.

It's also worth noting that ACA Medicaid Expansion enrollment specifically  was 20.9 million as of June 2024 according to the MBES report, down around 3 million from the all-time high it reached in May 2023.

Finally, the summary report mentions in passing that ACA exchange enrollment in Qualified Health Plans (QHPs) was ~22.3 million in January, while Basic Health Plan (BHP) enrollment was 1.8 million.

Neither of these is surprising or unexpected, but it's noteworthy that these numbers are being officially recognized by the Musk/Trump admin under the circumstances.

As for my concerns about potential manipulation of data by the Musk/Trump Admin, once again I'm still not seeing any obvious red flags in this month's report.

Total Medicaid/CHIP enrollment is reported as being down, but not by a crazy amount (around 0.9% nationally from Dec - Jan). This is a bit higher than I would expect in a post-Unwinding period, but there's often some data weirdness as the data turns over from one calendar year to the next which may explain it.

At the state level, 22 states saw a drop of more than 1% (Montana had the highest drop at 3.0%)...while one state (Hawaii) had an increase of over 1%.

Note that Rhode Island's January data is unavailable due to a massive data security breach they were dealing with at the time.

Again, I'll continue to keep a close eye on this, but it doesn't look like Musk/Trump's CMS are messing with this data as of yet.

Unfortunately, given all the attention/focus there's been on ACA Medicaid expansion enrollees lately, that data is still only updated through June 2024 as of this writing, nearly a year out of date.