Web Briefing on December 11 to Demonstrate Interactive Tool’s Potential Uses

More than half of the nation’s 67.9 million Medicaid beneficiaries now receive their health care in comprehensive managed care organizations (MCOs) – and the number and share are growing.  As states expand their use of Medicaid managed care, the Kaiser Family Foundation has launched a new interactive tool to enhance understanding and analysis of this important sector of the Medicaid program.

The Medicaid Managed Care Market Tracker, a new feature of the Foundation’s State Health Facts data center, provides the latest data on key dimensions of risk-based Medicaid managed care for the 39 states that contract with MCOs – these states are home to more than 90 percent of all Medicaid beneficiaries nationwide.  Included in the data are state- and plan-specific information on enrollment and spending; MCO quality; MCO ownership by parent firms; and parent firm participation across insurance markets nationally.  Although MCO enrollment data are available only for the 19 states that publicly report this information, MCO enrollees in these 19 states account for more than 45 percent of all Medicaid beneficiaries nationwide.  Constructed with data from multiple sources, the Tracker gathers and organizes in one place a wide range of information about the Medicaid managed care market in an interactive format that can be used flexibly for national, state-level, MCO-level, firm-level, and insurance market-level analysis.  For example, it can be used to answer questions such as:

• What share of all Medicaid beneficiaries in my state are enrolled in MCOs?

• Which Medicaid MCOs are owned by multi-state firms like Aetna and WellPoint?

• In which states and insurance markets does UnitedHealth Group operate?

On Thursday, December 11 at 12:30 p.m. ET, the Foundation will host an interactive web briefing with Medicaid managed care expert Julia Paradise, an Associate Director of the Foundation’s Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured.  She will discuss and demonstrate how the new tool can be used to retrieve and analyze Medicaid managed care data. Register here for the web briefing. Shortly after registering, participants will receive a confirmation email that contains information about how to join the web briefing.

Also available is a new resource, Key Findings on Medicaid Managed Care: Highlights from the Medicaid Managed Care Market Tracker, which is based on the new online Data Collection and illustrates its scope.

For more information on Medicaid, visit kff.org.