Medicaid enrollment in Pennsylvania has risen nearly 14 percent in the past year as rising unemployment resulting from COVID-19 drives people to turn to the state for health insurance.

As a result, Pennsylvania has added nearly 400,000 people to its Medicaid rolls in the past year.  Today, 3.2 million Pennsylvanians are enrolled in the state’s program, although among them are approximately 250,000 who would have been dropped from the program except for a federal requirement that the state not drop people from the program in exchange for a major increase in federal aid for the state’s program.

As a result of the increase, the state’s Department of Human Services, which runs its Medicaid program, has asked the legislature for nearly $1 billion in supplemental funding to help finance its services for this expanded enrollment through the rest of the state’s FY 2021 year.

Learn more about the past year’s increase in Medicaid enrollment, who the new enrollees are, and how the state is accommodating them in the Philadelphia Inquirer article “A huge spike in Medicaid enrollment in Pa. shows how devastating the coronavirus has been.”