Adult Coverage Has Fallen by 12,500 Since the BadgerCare Changes Took Effect
Total enrollment in BadgerCare fell by 9,244 in August, and is off by 11,900 since the start of the state fiscal year (on July 1). Looking more closely at the latest data, enrollment of children actually grew by more than 600 during July and August. The number of adults in BadgerCare fell by 12,518 (4.1%) during those two months, including a drop of more than 10,000 in August alone.
Officials in the Dept. of Health Services (DHS) have commented on occasion that we should wait a few months for the data to shake out before we can get a reliable reading of the effects of the changes to BadgerCare that took effect in July. One reason to take care in using these early trends is that some people who initially lose coverage for failure to pay a new premium may be able to re-enroll. I agree that the August numbers should be used with caution, but I think those figures make it pretty clear that the BadgerCare changes are significantly reducing program participation.
Fortunately, the sharp drop-off in enrollment since June has not adversely affected children. That can be attributed to the “maintenance of effort” (MOE) requirements in the Affordable Care Act, which precluded DHS from implementing proposals that they anticipated would reduce BadgerCare enrollment by more than 29,000 children. As I noted last week in a WCCF blog post about the DHS budget request for the next biennium, the department now projects that the cost-savings changes to BadgerCare initiated in July will reduce BadgerCare enrollment by roughly 21,500 adults by the end of the current fiscal year. That’s a larger decline than the figure of about 17,000 that we had been using (which was a WCCF approximation derived from previous DHS and Legislative Fiscal Bureau documents).
One factor in the declining enrollment continues to be the moratorium on enrolling childless adults in the BadgerCare Core Plan. Their participation has dropped by a little over 1,300 since June, a decline of 5.4% in two months. (Read more about that issue in our June 1, 2012 blog post.)
Jon Peacock
