Fenton Medicaid COVID-19 payments reached $361,948 in 2024, with highest reported spending statewide

In 2024, Medicaid payments in Fenton amounted to no less than $361,948 for services billed with HCPCS codes specifically associated with COVID-19, according to data reported by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Medicaid Provider Spending database.

Medicaid, a public health insurance initiative operated at the state level with funding shared by federal and state governments, serves low-income people and families, seniors, children, and individuals with disabilities. It ranks among the largest sectors in the national health care system.

Fluctuations in local Medicaid billing levels demonstrate how community health care resources financed by taxpayers are distributed.

This review identifies COVID-19 services using HCPCS codes labeled or classified as “COVID-19” or “coronavirus” in billing records or data references. The payment figures solely represent services with explicit COVID-19 labels in billing, not other pandemic-related medical care billed through more general or differently named codes.

Fenton reported the highest Medicaid payment total in the state for COVID-19-related services in 2024.

Four individual providers in Fenton filed Medicaid claims for COVID-19–coded services that year. One code, COVID Specific, was responsible for $361,108 in billing.

The typical Medicaid payment per provider for COVID-19–related services in Fenton stood at $90,487, surpassing the state’s average of $12,927 per provider.

COVID-19–specific Medicaid spending represented a notable component of spending increases in Fenton during the pandemic years.

Between 2020 and 2024, overall Medicaid payments across non-COVID claim categories grew by $3,905,733, an increase of 46.1%.

For the two years before the pandemic, average annual Medicaid spending in Fenton was $6,438,007.

According to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, federal and state Medicaid expenditures together were around $871.7 billion in fiscal year 2023, equal to roughly 18% of health care spending nationally. This reflects a large jump from the $613.5 billion spent in 2019 prior to the onset of COVID-19.

This change marks almost 40% growth in just a few years, led primarily by increases in Medicaid enrollment and service use during and following the pandemic.

Recent federal budget actions under the Trump administration proposed sizable reductions to Medicaid’s federal funding and changes to program structure. For instance, the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which became law in 2025, is forecast to cut more than $1 trillion in federal Medicaid outlays over 10 years and sets policies such as beneficiary work requirements and boosted cost-sharing. These adjustments are anticipated to shift more program costs onto states and limit federal Medicaid funding growth, with possible impacts on some Americans’ coverage, though the program continues serving dozens of millions nationwide.

Note: This covers only HCPCS codes clearly identified for COVID-19 care and does not account for all pandemic-associated health care expenditures.

Details in this story derive from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Medicaid Provider Spending database, available here.