Medicaid spending on alcohol and drug abuse treatment climbs 22% in Malta in 2024

In 2024, Medicaid providers in Malta billed $126,395 for services in the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Treatment category, based on information from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Medicaid Provider Spending database. This was a 21.7% bump compared to 2023, when $103,828 was billed for the same services.

Medicaid is a public health insurance program funded jointly by state and federal governments and administered by individual states. The program covers low-income residents, families, older adults, children, and individuals with disabilities, making it a key component of the national health care system.

Since Medicaid payments use public funding, shifts in local billings illustrate how community health dollars are allocated.

The Alcohol and Drug Abuse Treatment category groups together Medicaid-billed services by type of care using defined HCPCS and CPT code ranges. This analysis assigned service codes to a single group based on their code prefix and number span, allowing clear comparison of related services while eliminating duplication and maintaining accurate long-term trends.

Alcohol and Drug Abuse Treatment was the second-largest individual Medicaid payments category in Malta for 2024, among several service categories with year-over-year spending growth.

This category placed third for total payments among all Medicaid service categories in Montana in 2024.

Between 2019 and 2024, Medicaid payments for Alcohol and Drug Abuse Treatment services in Malta increased $33,051, or 20.7%. Growth in spending picked up during certain intervals, especially in 2021 and 2022 with sizeable year-on-year jumps.

Within the city, money spent on Alcohol and Drug Abuse Treatment was not evenly distributed. In 2024, ZIP code 59538 represented the entire $126,395 billed for the category. This ZIP code alone made up 100% of Medicaid payments for these services in Malta that year.

Payments for Alcohol and Drug Abuse Treatment were also concentrated within a small number of individual service codes for Medicaid billing.

When comparing spending, Medicaid payments for Alcohol and Drug Abuse Treatment increased 21.7% between 2024 and 2023, a sharper rise than the 11.1% growth across all Medicaid billing categories in the city for the same period.

Data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services show that combined federal and state Medicaid spending reached approximately $871.7 billion during fiscal year 2023, making up about 18% of all U.S. health expenses—a notable rise from $613.5 billion in 2019, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.

This growth amounts to an increase of close to 40% in just a few years, fueled largely by higher enrollment and increased service use associated with and after the pandemic.

Recent federal budget measures introduced under the Trump administration proposed substantial cuts to federal Medicaid support and significant organizational changes. The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” passed in 2025, is expected to eliminate more than $1 trillion from federal Medicaid expenditures over 10 years, adding work requirements and boosting cost-sharing. These provisions may limit coverage for some recipients and would rely more heavily on state funding going forward, despite the ongoing large size of the Medicaid program.

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.