April CMS Report Analysis: Net gain of about 120K Medicaid/CHIP enrollees

As of 1 month ago (May 4th), my calculations of NEWLY ADDED Medicaid/CHIP determinations stood at:

• 4.89 million "strict expansion" enrollees
• 1.19 million bulk transfers from existing programs
• 2.26 million "woodworker" enrollees
• Total: 8.34 million new determinations

Between various state-level Medicaid enrollee updates as well as today's April CMS report (referred to earlier today), these numbers have changed as follows:

• 5.05 million "strict expansion" enrollees
• 1.19 million bulk transfers (no change)
• 2.22 million "woodworker" enrollees
• Total: 8.46 million new determinations

As you can see, while the overall number did go up by about 120,000 overall, the "woodworker" estimate actually went down. This happened for a couple of reasons: First, some of my state-level estimates proved to be a too high; in addition, however, there's a difference between Medicaid/CHIP determinations and actual enrollments, which some of the states gave updated numbers for.

The actual report states that NET Medicaid/CHIP enrollees has gone up by about 6 million since last fall (6,050,059 to be precise). In Medicaid expansion states, enrollments went up 15.3%; in non-expansion states, it still went up about 3.3% due primarily to the "woodworker effect".

6 million actual new enrollees out of 8.46 million new determinations sounds about right to me--that's around 71% of the total determinations. However, it's worth noting that this does not include new Medicaid/CHIP determinations through the ACA exchange websites for part of the month for many states, since the HHS department has decided to stop issuing their monthly report for the exchanges, much to my irritation; that data is only good through April 19th.