Medicaid By State in 2020: At Least Some of the Data Is Back

I once wrote a post on how New York’s Medicaid spending, by age and by type of service, compared with the national average and nearby states, every couple of years.  The “State Datamart” that allowed crosstabulations of the number of Medicaid beneficiaries and expenditures, by age and by type of service, disappeared after FY 2012, after fewer and fewer states had been included for several years.  That data had allowed expenditures per beneficiary, by age group and by service type, to be calculated for each state, and the number of beneficiaries in each age group to be compared with the total population in that age group, and the population in poverty in that age group, by state.

Today there is a different set of data that has been posted, and I plan to tabulate what is available and write a couple of posts.  The PDF report is here.

Click to access MACStats-Medicaid-and-CHIP-Data-Book-December-2021.pdf

And the data is at http.//macpac.gov/macstats.

It isn’t what I was once able to get, but it is more than I’ve been able to find for many years.  A quick comparison of total Medicaid expenditures in 2020, as a percent of the personal income of residents of each state, and what it cost those residents in state and local taxes, follows.

Health Care: 2017 Census of Governments Data

Many New Yorkers were stunned when Mayor Bill DeBlasio announced that the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, which runs public hospitals in the city, rather than the legendary New York City Health Department, would take the lead on testing and contact tracing as the city attempts to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It makes absolutely no sense to move a function that has been done well by a great health department for decades to an organization that does not have the legal, epidemiologic, administrative or technical experience to manage it,” said Dr. Tom Frieden, a former city health commissioner and former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Perhaps Mayor DeBlasio knows something that the Times and Dr. Frieden do not.  That when measured per $1,000 of the personal income of all city residents, the Department of Health doesn’t have as much funding as it did back when former Mayor Bloomberg was nagging us about our health. That is one of the findings of an analysis of state and local government Health, Hospitals and Medicaid Vendor Payment expenditures, and the jointly funded federal and state (and in NY local) government Medicaid program that is used to pay for most of them.