Medicaid: States' Use of Managed Care

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In summary, we identified four groups of states that differed in their use of Medicaid managed care on the basis of the 12 indicators we included in our analysis. A handful of these indicators—namely Medicaid enrollment in MCOs and PCCM programs, HMO penetration rates, and the concentration of low-income individuals that lived in urban areas—had significant influence on how states grouped. In contrast, within the four groups, considerable variation existed among the other indicators we examined, such as states’ primary care capacity and commercial HMO market index. For labeling purposes, we typically describe the four groups on the basis of states’ enrollment of Medicaid beneficiaries in MCOs and PCCM programs—generally the predominant similarity among the states within each group: