Medicaid enrollment during the COVID-19 public health emergency

As expected, Medicaid enrollment has risen during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a report published on the JAMA Network. But necessarily for the reason that might be expected. According to the report, Medicaid enrollment rose from 48.2 million to 51.8 million between January 2019 and September 2020, or 1.6 percent, in Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansion states and from 17.2 million to 18.8 million, or 1.4 percent, in non-Medicaid expansion states.While a natural assumption would be that growth in Medicaid enrollment would track growth in pandemic-caused growth in unemployment, the analysis found the opposite to be true:  “…enrollment growth was [...]