Medicaid payments for Medicine Services and Procedures in Los Angeles rise to $398.6 million in 2024

Medicaid providers in Los Angeles submitted $398,580,366 in claims for the Medicine Services and Procedures category in 2024, data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Medicaid Provider Spending database show. This total represents a 21.3% increase over the prior year, when claims for these services totaled $328,689,096.

Medicaid is a state-administered program, funded by both federal and state governments. It provides health coverage to low-income residents, including families, seniors, children, and individuals with disabilities, and is a major component of the U.S. health care system.

Because taxpayer funds support Medicaid payments, shifts in local billing levels highlight how public health care resources are directed in a community.

The “Medicine Services and Procedures” category encompasses Medicaid-billed services defined according to standardized HCPCS and CPT code classifications. For this analysis, each billing code was grouped into an individual service category relying on code prefixes and numeric blocks, allowing related services to be tracked as a group without double counting and ensuring accurate year-over-year rankings.

While Medicaid spending rose in several categories, Medicine Services and Procedures took the second-highest spot in Los Angeles by total Medicaid payments in 2024.

Statewide, the Medicine Services and Procedures category was California’s third-largest category by Medicaid payments in 2024.

From five years preceding 2024, Medicaid payments for the Medicine Services and Procedures category in Los Angeles climbed $313,549,011, a 368.7% increase. Periods of accelerated spending growth were noted, including significant annual jumps in 2023 and 2020.

Spending for Medicine Services and Procedures was distributed across Los Angeles, but payments were concentrated in only a few ZIP codes. The leading ZIP codes were 90020 with $292,540,845, 90027 with $15,585,937, and 90003 with $10,385,592 in Medicaid payments in 2024. Combined, these top 3 ZIP codes made up 79.9% of Los Angeles’s Medicaid payments for Medicine Services and Procedures that year.

Medicaid spending within this category was heavily focused in a small set of billing codes.

Comparatively, Medicaid payments for the category increased 21.3% in Los Angeles between 2024 and the previous year, compared with a 12.9% rise across all Medicaid claim categories in the city during the same time.

According to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, combined federal and state Medicaid spending totaled approximately $871.7 billion in fiscal year 2023, accounting for about 18% of all national health expenditures, rising sharply from around $613.5 billion in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic.

This growth, representing an increase of nearly 40% over several years, was primarily driven by expanded enrollment and greater service utilization during and after the pandemic.

Recent federal budget policies under the Trump administration featured major proposals to scale back federal Medicaid funding and restructure benefits. The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” signed in 2025, is forecasted to trim federal Medicaid support by more than $1 trillion over the next 10 years, introducing elements such as work requirements and higher cost-sharing that may reduce coverage and funding for some enrollees. These measures shift more fiscal responsibility to states and are expected to limit federal Medicaid expansion even as the program continues to cover tens of millions of people.

Note: HCPCS codes are shown for context within the category. Category totals and rankings in this article are based on standardized service groupings rather than individual billing codes.

Information in this article was obtained from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Medicaid Provider Spending database. The source data can be found here.