The CMS is taking a deep data dive into Medicaid enrollment data to uncover just how many new adults have joined the state programs since the Affordable Care Act motivated many states to expand eligibility last year.
In the first three months of last year, 3.2 million new adults joined the program, the CMS said in a report posted Jan. 23 (PDF).
Even though the agency has been releasing monthly reports on Medicaid enrollment for some time, those figures did not give a nuanced look at what effect the ACA was having on enrollment because they included children and re-enrollees.
The report only tracks enrollment in states that expanded Medicaid as of March 2014, so Michigan, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania were not included. Also not included in the report were California, Washington, D.C., and North Dakota because the agency was still reviewing their data for accuracy.
Among states for which data was released, New Jersey had the highest number of new adult enrollees with more than 395,000, followed by Illinois with more than 384,000, Washington state with more than 353,000 and Oregon with more than 340,000.
The CMS expects to post enrollment data for subsequent quarters in the coming months. When the ACA was signed into law in 2010, there were 21.6 million uninsured adults that had incomes at or below the new Medicaid eligibility limit of 138% of the federal poverty level, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Follow Virgil Dickson on Twitter: @MHvdickson
