128K more enrolled in Medicaid four years after COVID

(The Center Square) – There are more than 100,000 more people enrolled in Medicaid in Wisconsin now than before COVID struck.

Wisconsin Medicaid director Bill Hanna spoke at a Wisconsin Health News Newsmaker event Tuesday.

He said while Wisconsin’s Medicaid enrollments are down from their peak, more people are receiving government health care now than before the pandemic.

“In March of 2020, Wisconsin Medicaid enrolled about 1.2 million people. At our peak in May of 2023, right before we started the unwinding, we had 1.68 million people,” Hanna explained. “That's a gain of 477,000 people over that pandemic. Right now, as of June … we're at 1.33 million.”

The overwhelming, some 912,000, are enrolled in BadgerCare Plus. Nearly 400,000 of them are children.

There are another 246,000 elderly and disabled people enrolled in Medicaid in Wisconsin.

“One way to look at that is that's 350,000 roughly less [people] than our peak number,” Hanna explained. “Or it's 128,000 more than where we were at the start of the pandemic.”

Wisconsin, and every other state, is about a year into the post-COVID redetermination, or what Hanna calls the “unwinding.”

That is the process of removing people from the Medicaid rolls either because the federal guidelines changed, or because those people no longer qualify.

“It's hard to put a value judgment on is that the right number?” Hanna added. “The right number is that everybody who's eligible is enrolled, and that they've gone through the process to determine that eligibility. So, this is about 10% higher than where we were roughly four years ago. That's not unsurprising, because even in 2020 there were likely people eligible that we didn't know about that we picked up over a four-year period.”

Hanna did not say just what the extra 128,000 people are costing the state, but he did say that Wisconsin’s full Medicaid budget is $15 billion a year.