Medicaid COVID-19 claims in El Reno reached $121,836 in 2024

In El Reno, Medicaid claims for services linked to COVID-19 totaled no less than $121,836 in 2024, based on data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Medicaid Provider Spending database.

Medicaid is a public insurance program overseen by each state and is supported by both federal and state funding. It provides coverage for low-income people, families, older adults, children and individuals with disabilities, making it one of the key pillars of the U.S. health care system.

Since taxpayer funds support Medicaid, fluctuations in local billing reveal how communities allocate public health care resources.

This analysis used HCPCS codes where descriptions or reference data specified “COVID-19” or “coronavirus” to pinpoint COVID-related billing. Therefore, results reflect services billed under those labels and do not include pandemic-related services billed with broader or different codes.

As a point of comparison, Lawton led Oklahoma with $1,223,479 in COVID-19-related Medicaid claims submitted in 2024.

On average, Medicaid providers in El Reno billed $40,612 each for COVID-19 services, a figure higher than the state’s average of $22,314 per provider.

During the pandemic years, El Reno saw a notable share of Medicaid spending shift toward COVID-19–related services.

Medicaid payments for all other service categories grew by $935,027 from 2020 through 2024, which equates to a 34.9% increase.

In the two years just before the pandemic, El Reno’s annual average Medicaid payments totaled $1,995,989.

According to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, total state and federal Medicaid spending reached approximately $871.7 billion for fiscal year 2023, making up close to 18% of national health expenditures. This marks a steep rise from $613.5 billion in 2019, ahead of the COVID-19 pandemic.

That growth is about 40% over several years, driven primarily by more enrollees and greater use of health care during and following the pandemic.

Recent federal budget law under the Trump administration has featured major plans to scale back federal Medicaid funds and alter the way the program is structured. The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” signed into law in 2025, is expected to reduce federal Medicaid funding by more than $1 trillion over 10 years and implements policies like work requirements and increased cost-sharing that could diminish benefits and funding for certain Medicaid users. These changes are set to shift increased costs to states and constrain federal spending growth, even as Medicaid still serves tens of millions of Americans.

Note: Includes HCPCS codes explicitly labeled for COVID-19 services; totals do not represent all pandemic-related health care spending.

Information in this article was collected using the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Medicaid Provider Spending database. The source data is available here.