Public Administration Commons^™

Administrative Easing: Rule Reduction And Medicaid Enrollment, Ashley Fox, Wenhui Feng, Edmund Stazyk

Public Administration and Policy Faculty Scholarship

Administrative burden is widely recognized as a barrier to program enrollment, denying legal entitlements to many eligible individuals. We examine what effect voluntary state reductions in administrative burden (what we call administrative easing) have had on Medicaid enrollment rates using differential implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Using a novel dataset that includes state-level data on simplified enrollment and renewal procedures for Medicaid from 2008-2017, we examine how change in Medicaid enrollment is conditioned by the adoption of rule-reduction procedures. We find that reductions in the administrative burden required to signup for Medicaid were associated with increased enrollments. Real-time eligibility …