DPW says the new reporting method is just as accurate as the old one, merely different. But it will not disclose its new method or recalculate the latest Medicaid data using the old formula.
"The timing is suspicious, and it obscures the impact of the decisions that DPW had made," said Sharon Ward, executive director of the nonpartisan Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center. "What they've done now is made it really impossible to compare."
Anne Bale, a DPW spokeswoman, said the department made the revisions because its long-standing method of reporting Medicaid enrollment counted recipients more than once if they received benefits from more than one program.
"The hope was to get rid of that duplicate issue so the numbers were more accurate," Bale said.
For consistency, the monthly reports have been revised back to July 2010. A comparison of both methods shows that the number of enrolled adults, just over one million, is between 50,000 and 88,000 lower every month in the revised data. The last month with both sets of numbers was November.
Policy experts who follow the reports said they had expected the downward trend to continue in December, both because duplicates were removed and also because the state was still working through a backlog of controversial eligibility reviews that it says has resulted in 65,000 adults losing benefits over the last few months.
Enrollment data for children, which is still calculated using the old method, showed a drop of 88,000 - half of that in December alone - since August, a period that roughly coincided with reviews that caused 71,000 children to lose benefits. (Bale said the children's data would soon be revised as well.)
The opposite happened for adults.
"I am totally flummoxed by what they are doing," said Richard Weishaupt, senior attorney at Community Legal Services of Philadelphia.
