Study Outlines Limits on Medicaid-to-ACA-Plan Pipeline

  • Jul 12, 2024

    As states resumed their Medicaid eligibility redeterminations last spring, some experts suggested that states should prioritize enrolling Medicaid managed care (MMC) enrollees who were losing coverage with the same carrier in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) individual marketplace. Private insurers like Centene Corp. have also emphasized this strategy, with the goal of stemming member attrition. However, a new study from Health Affairs suggests that “a within-carrier transition is likely to be possible only for roughly half of Medicaid managed care enrollees.”

    By examining Clarivate’s InterStudy enrollment data from 2021, researchers found that in 2021, 52.1% of MMC members were enrolled by a carrier that also had a plan on the ACA marketplace in the same county. Among all MMC enrollees, 24.5% were in counties where the largest insurer was the same in both Medicaid and the ACA marketplace. In 10.3% of the 2,625 counties with MMC, all MMC enrollees were in a plan offered by an insurer that also had a marketplace plan.

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    © 2024 MMIT
  • Jinghong Chen

    Jinghong has been producing infographics and data stories on employer-sponsored insurance, public health insurance programs and prescription drug coverage for AIS Health’s Health Plan Weekly and Radar on Drug Benefits since 2018. She also manages AIS Health’s annual executive compensation database for top insurers and Blue Cross and Blue Shield affiliates. Before joining AIS Health, she interned at WBEZ, Al Jazeera English and The New York Times Chinese. She graduated from Missouri School of Journalism with a focus on data journalism and international reporting.

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