This article told the story behind the Medicaid backlog in California and broke the news that state officials had decided to focus on the Covered California exchange ahead of the expansion of Medicaid, significantly contributing to the backlog of 900,000 applications. We found that state officials had repeatedly made decisions to place the Medicaid expansion on the back burner, ultimately impacting hundreds of thousands of low-income people. In the months after the expansion of Medicaid, there were many headlines on the massive application backlogs nationwide. California had the largest backlog, but until this story, no one knew exactly why. We told that story.
