By the numbers
After spiking sharply during the COVID-19 pandemic, the share of Wisconsin’s population enrolled in Medicaid has declined substantially and has nearly returned to its pre-pandemic baseline.
From the late 1990s to 2010, the share of Wisconsin’s population enrolled across all forms of Medicaid — including BadgerCare Plus, as the federal health coverage program is branded in Wisconsin — expanded from about 7.8 percent to about 19 percent. From 2011 to early 2020, that rate of growth leveled off, holding around 19 to 20 percent.
During the pandemic, federal policy drove a dramatic increase. In March 2020, Congress temporarily increased the proportion of Medicaid costs the federal government would cover for states, on the condition that states maintained Medicaid coverage for nearly everyone enrolled during the emergency. New applicants could continue to enroll, but existing members could not be disenrolled, effectively creating a one-way ratchet.
Enrollment in Wisconsin jumped by 43,000 the month after the policy was changed and continued growing by thousands more every month. By May 2023, enrollment reached 1.68 million people, or around 28 percent of the state’s population.
After the pandemic limits ended, enrollment began to decline. Wisconsin resumed annual renewals in June 2023, causing enrollment to fall rapidly until reaching about 1.26 million two years later, after which disenrollments slowed. By April 2026, there were still 60,888 more people on Medicaid than when the pandemic began, according to the DHS.
The enrollment share has nearly returned to its pre-pandemic baseline at around 20.4 percent of the population — about one tenth of a percentage point higher than the share in March 2020.
On the nearby graph, the left-hand segment of the curve uses annual June enrollment observations from the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ Medicaid Analytic eXtract (MAX) reports for 1999 through 2013. MAX was constructed by the CMS from states’ administrative eligibility records. The right-hand segment uses state-reported CMS-64 enrollment from January 2014 through June 2017 and Wisconsin ForwardHealth grand total enrollment beginning in July 2017. CMS-64 counts unduplicated Title XIX Medicaid enrollees with coverage at any time during the month, while ForwardHealth totals its reported state coverage groups. The break in the line at 2014 represents a methodological change and should not be interpreted entirely as a change in enrollment.
Population estimates are taken from the Wisconsin Department of Administration.
Further reading: Medicare spending now makes up nearly a third of Wisconsin’s state budget, and the program is in need of better accountability. More in the Mandate for Madison 2026.
Wyatt Eichholz is a policy and legislative associate at the Badger Institute.
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