CT and surrounding states provide better than average quality care to Medicaid members

CMS has published a new Medicaid/CHIP scorecard to promote accountability and transparency in states’ programs. The site allows comparisons of state enrollment, eligibility, and access to relevant documents (state plan amendments and waivers) and expenditures. Most interesting is comparisons by state across adult and child health quality metrics for 2016. Like our neighboring states, CT does well on most quality measures, but one area that needs a lot of improvement is ED visits for children. Access to care for pregnant women in CT’s program is mixed. Dental and behavioral health care are generally very good. In 2015, CT spending on home and community-based care was about half of all long term services and supports spending, similar to the US average but below our surrounding states. Unlike all our surrounding states, CT has no enrollment data available on the site and we need to do better on the number of quality measures we report, especially for children’s care.