Rates of Medicaid Churn and Continuous Coverage Among Children and Working-Age Adults with Disability-Related Eligibility

Access to health services and long-term services and supports (LTSS) is often critical to the well-being of people with disabilities. However, sometimes Medicaid beneficiaries, including those with disabilities, disenroll from the program, only to return to the rolls a few months later—an event often referred to as “churn.” In this brief, we use data from the Transformed Medicaid Statistical Information System Analytic File to examine rates of disenrollment, churn, and continuous coverage among various categories of children and working-age adult Medicaid beneficiaries whose eligibility is disability related. We find meaningful variation in disenrollment and churn across beneficiary categories. Beneficiaries with Supplemental Security Income related eligibility have especially low rates of disenrollment and high rates of reenrollment when compared with other categories of beneficiaries.