Where is Medicaid enrollment surging? Notes from a few states

Subscribe to xpostfactoid via box at top right. You'll get 2-3 posts per week, mostly re ACA.

Last month, the Urban Institute forecast that at 15% unemployment, between 8.2 million and 14.3 million people would enroll in Medicaid, an increase of 11-20%.* While the job rate officially now stands at 13.3%, it would be 3 points higher if those classified as employed but absent from work were counted as unemployed, as BLS says they should be (see pg. 6 here).

I have been tracking Medicaid enrollment in states that have accepted the ACA Medicaid expansion and that report timely monthly data. As of early May, enrollment in Kentucky and Minnesota was the highest I was able to track, having increased about 8% since February.  Nationally, the increase at that point was probably about half that. In both states, enrollment increased by another 2% from May to June.

Below, a few bulletins from states (including MN and KY) showing significant enrollment growth. A 2% jump in a given month seems like a frequent marker that enrollment is getting in gear.

As if Marcus Garvey had his way

Via Goldblog, I'm reminded of a familiar thought prompted by Andre Aciman's reminder of an Exodus on the NYT op-ed page:

The president never said a word about me. Or, for that matter, about any of the other 800,000 or so Jews born in the Middle East who fled the Arab and Muslim world or who were summarily expelled for being Jewish in the 20th century. With all his references to the history of Islam and to its (questionable) "proud tradition of tolerance" of other faiths, Mr. Obama never said anything about those Jews whose ancestors had been living in Arab lands long before the advent of Islam but were its first victims once rampant nationalism swept over the Arab world.

I have often thought that the single best justification for the State of Israel is the fact that Jews were an oppressed minority throughout the Middle East who had a chance, mainly after the founding of the state of Israel by mainly Ashkenazi Jews, to build a home in a sliver of land carved out from the vast acres of their former oppressors. Yes, European antisemitism was more virulent than the Muslim variety, but Sephardic Jews were very much second-class citizens in Arab lands. It's somewhat as if African Americans got hold of a piece of the Arizona desert and built their own state there.