What’s New in April 2012!

• A new report is available titled “Medicaid Enrollment Gaps, 2005 to 2007”.  The Medicaid program provides health insurance coverage every year to more than 60 million Americans spanning all ages.  Eligibility is based on both categorical factors and income.  Each can change, resulting in a potential loss of eligibility for an enrollee.  Prior research has established that the loss of Medicaid coverage, whether temporary or permanent, has consequences for both the individual and the community.  In this report, we use data from a new source—Medicaid administrative records that have been unduplicated and linked over time—to investigate discontinuities in Medicaid enrollment by eligibility group and state over the period January 2005 through December 2007. 
•  A new Issue Brief is now available, titled “Movement of Children between Medicaid and CHIP, 2005 to 2007”.  The Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) provides health insurance coverage to millions of children whose families are unable to obtain employer-sponsored insurance or purchase private non-group coverage but whose incomes are above the limits that would qualify their children for Medicaid.  Family incomes are fluid, however, and many children who receive coverage through CHIP were covered by Medicaid earlier or will shift their coverage to Medicaid later.  This issue brief uses data from a new source—Medicaid administrative records that have been unduplicated and linked over time—to examine the movement of children between Medicaid and CHIP from 2005 through 2007.  These findings provide perspective on potential transitions in coverage among low-income adults once the Affordable Care Act is fully implemented.  

What's New in February 2012!

A new report, based on the MAX Enrollee Master (MAXEM) data report has been released. This report presents an analysis of unduplicated MAX enrollment data showing patterns of children's enrollment in regular Medicaid, M-CHIP, and S-CHIP during the same year and over a three-year period. The report includes estimates of the frequency of transitions between pairs of programs and the incidence of gaps in coverage between spells of enrollment. All of the empirical findings are presented by state.

MAXEM Description

Development of the Medicaid Analytic Extract Enrollee Master (MAXEM) Data, 2005 to 2007

Recent policy developments have highlighted the importance of developing a more effective means of linking Medicaid records over time and across states. To address this and related needs, CMS contracted with Mathematica to design and implement a new MAXEM data set that removes duplicate enrollee records both within and across years and within and across states.  Two reports have been completed and released.  The first report describes the design and development of the MAXEM data for 2005 and 2006.  The second report describes the design and development of the MAXEM data for 2005-2007.  While these data sets will not be released to the research community, there is a wealth of information contained in these reports about enrollment over time and enrollees with more than one record within a state and across states.