How Many Medicaid Recipients Might Be Eligible for SSI?
Michael Levere and David Wittenburg, Mathematica
This project will estimate the number of child Medicaid recipients who might be eligible but are not currently receiving SSI using CMS administrative Medicaid data. The results can help SSA to better understand the potentially eligible child SSI population, informing outreach efforts to improve take-up among those who are eligible.
With recent substantive declines in SSI applications, there are concerns that children who might be eligible for SSI are not able to access it. During the pandemic, applications declined dramatically. Yet this decline was not uniform across regions (Levere et al. 2022b), consistent with long-standing geographical variation in child SSI participation (Schmidt and Sevak 2017). SSA has sought to reach vulnerable populations to support more equitable access, though it is difficult to determine how to target those efforts most efficiently. One critical step to make this determination is more fully understanding the number of potentially eligible children in an area, as well as their characteristics.
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