Medicaid payments for medicine services and procedures total $337,053 in Arab, Alabama for 2024

In 2024, Medicaid providers in Arab reported $337,053 in billings for services within the Medicine Services and Procedures category, as shown by data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Medicaid Provider Spending database. This represented a 9.9% rise from 2023, when billing in this category amounted to $306,807.

Medicaid serves as a publicly funded health insurance program administered by the states and financed through both federal and state funds. It provides coverage to low-income residents, families, senior citizens, children, and people with disabilities, and ranks among the largest parts of the national health care system.

Because Medicaid funding relies on taxpayer contributions, shifts in billing at the local level indicate how a community’s health care spending is allocated.

The “Medicine Services and Procedures” category identifies a group of Medicaid-billed procedures based on the type of care delivered, determined by established HCPCS and CPT code groupings. For this report, each billing code was assigned to a single service group using uniform code prefixes and numerical ranges to group similar services, prevent double counting, and maintain proper rankings across time periods.

While Medicaid expenditures climbed in multiple categories, Medicine Services and Procedures held the second-highest ranking for Medicaid payments in Arab in 2024.

Within Alabama, Medicine Services and Procedures ranked fourth in total state payments for 2024.

From 2019 through 2024, Arab’s Medicaid payments in Medicine Services and Procedures grew by $196,912, an increase of 140.5%. The pace of growth picked up in select years, with substantial annual changes noted in 2021 and 2020.

Although Medicaid spending for Medicine Services and Procedures was distributed citywide, the majority of payments occurred in a small number of ZIP codes. For 2024, ZIP code 35016 accounted for $337,053 tied to this category, equaling 100% of all such Medicaid payments across Arab that year.

Within the category, payments were focused on relatively few specific billing codes for individual services.

Arab saw a 9.9% year-over-year gain in Medicaid payments for Medicine Services and Procedures from 2023 to 2024, compared to an 8.1% change spanning all Medicaid claim categories in the area during that period.

According to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, federal and state Medicaid expenses reached approximately $871.7 billion for fiscal 2023, making up about 18% of the country’s total health care spending and marking a significant increase from $613.5 billion in 2019, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.

This growth reflects roughly a 40% jump within just a few years, mainly attributed to greater enrollment and rising utilization during and after the pandemic period.

Recent federal budget actions during the Trump administration have featured major proposals to scale back federal Medicaid funding and alter the program’s structure. The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” enacted in 2025, is forecast to reduce federal Medicaid support by more than $1 trillion over the next 10 years. It brings policies like work requirements and expanded cost-sharing that could reduce coverage and federal payments for some enrollees, likely shifting additional costs to states even as Medicaid remains a vital safety net for millions of Americans.

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.