'A Big Positive': How One Company Plans to Profit From Medicaid Cuts [View all]

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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/03/health/medicaid-cuts-equifax-data.html

‘A Big Positive’: How One Company Plans to Profit From Medicaid Cuts
New work requirements are expected to leave millions of poor Americans uninsured. For Equifax, which charges states steep prices for its trove of employment data, it is a business opportunity.
By Sarah Kliff, Margot Sanger-Katz and Asmaa Elkeurti
Nov. 3, 2025 Updated 7:49 a.m. ET

When Equifax’s chief executive spoke to investors this summer, he described a “just massive” new business opportunity: helping states enforce the Medicaid work requirement that is expected to leave millions of poor people without health insurance.

Equifax already has a robust business providing income data to states, which some critics say borders on a monopoly. The company has made a practice of steeply and frequently increasing prices without improving its product, according to interviews with government officials, legal records and contracts reviewed by The New York Times.

Through exclusive contracts with payroll contractors and other employers, Equifax has built a vast database with current information on 99 million workers and over 750 million records. To check an applicant, a state worker can enter a Social Security number and almost instantly pull up wages and work hours — at prices that run as high as $15 for each data match, according to state records.

Now states are bracing for big increases in their payments both through price increases and because the new law will require them to check people’s incomes much more often.

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