During the Great Recession, as the ranks of poor and unemployed swelled, enrollment in Medicaid shot up, growing by 7.8 percent in 2009. At the same time, state tax revenues collapsed by nearly 17 percent. States couldn't afford to pay their share of Medicaid costs, and Congress came to the rescue with the Recovery Act, boosting federal Medicaid funding by around $103 billion. But the recovery dollars ran out in June, and now states are facing the biggest yearly increase in Medicaid costs in history, according to projections by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Missouri already spends over a quarter of the state budget on Medicaid.
