Ezra unpacks the ACA enrollment numbers:
The exchange numbers are solid. You can trust those. … But the Medicaid numbers are more complex. Each state runs its own count, and the data includes people who enrolled in Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion as well as people who were eligible under prior law. To the Obama administration’s annoyance, some states are also counting people who’re simply renewing existing Medicaid policies.
A lot of the 4.4 million people who got coverage under Medicaid in the last few months got it from Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. Even more would’ve gotten it if all the states were participating in Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. But some simply got coverage under the preexisting Medicaid program.
By Sean Trende’s rough estimates which, he admits, “may be off by a fair amount (in either direction),” only 190,000 of those 4.4 million were newly eligible:
[S]everal states that expanded Medicaid advertised this fact heavily and probably attracted a disproportionate number of people who were already eligible for Medicaid but didn’t know it. While it’s probably fair to attribute these enrollees to Obamacare, they would keep their coverage in the event of a repeal, and might not figure heavily in November. Regardless, even if you double the estimate — which seems awfully generous — that’s only 380,000 new Medicaid enrollees due to Obamacare, a far cry from 4 million.
This makes intuitive sense. The states that expanded Medicaid were blue states, many of which already had more generous Medicaid programs. In other words, their baselines were higher, so we’d expect the number of newly qualified recipients to be lower than if, say, Texas had participated.
The Dish 