Delaware Medicaid ex parte renewal share, August 2026

Ex parte share measures how much of the renewal burden the state carries instead of the beneficiary. It trends with data-matching infrastructure, which improves in vendor-release steps rather than smoothly.

Latest 71.2 (02/26); mean monthly change over trailing window 1.55pp; damped six-month projection = 75.8.

Half-weight trend continuation with volatility-scaled uncertainty; renewal cohorts differ month to month, so the interval is wider than the point trend alone would suggest.

The resolver is a Delaware state row, not a national weighted average: the original first-publication August 2026 reporting-period row in CMS State Medicaid and CHIP Eligibility Processing Data. The target is the share of completed Medicaid renewals processed ex parte, in percent rounded to one decimal.

Base-rate/reference class: the relevant outside view is Delaware's own recent original-submission first-print run, because the target resolves a single state row. The five inspected usable values average 61.3 percent, span 52.5 to 71.2 percent, and have a latest usable value of 71.2 percent.

Level, momentum, and mechanism: Delaware's level rose materially from the 2025 readings into February 2026, but the path is not smooth. The alternating drops and jumps point to renewal-cohort mix and small denominators as important, so I do not extrapolate the February jump linearly through August.

Prior/update/interval: prior model is latest-value persistence blended with a five-point Delaware mean and a damped local trend, using the limited observed original first-print subset from 2025-07, 2025-09, 2025-11, 2026-01, and 2026-02. I start at latest usable 71.2, add +1.6 pp for the higher 2026 level versus 2025 and mild CMS compliance pressure, and add +1.0 pp for remaining upward drift, giving 73.8. The 80% interval uses realized first-print dispersion, widened for six-month horizon, small-state cohort risk, and limited-sample/missing-month uncertainty, but compressed below the 100 percent ceiling.

Counter-consideration: upside outside the interval would require a durable data-match or system improvement and an ex parte-friendly renewal cohort pushing Delaware above 88.7 percent. Downside outside the interval would require a manual-heavy cohort, data-source outage, eligibility-system issue, or reporting break pushing the first print below 57.2 percent.

Historical mean = (55.5 + 52.5 + 66.8 + 60.5 + 71.2) / 5 = 61.3 percent. Observed adjacent changes in the usable subset were -3.0, +14.3, -6.3, and +10.7 pp, with mean absolute change 8.6 pp. Point calculation: latest usable 71.2 + 1.6 pp higher-level/compliance adjustment + 1.0 pp damped trend = 73.8. Interval calculation: center 73.8, lower half-width 16.6 pp and upper half-width 14.9 pp, yielding 57.2 to 88.7 after rounding.

Resolution-date note: the canonical ledger target uses 2026-12-15, tied to CMS's monthly data.Medicaid.gov release vehicle for a three-to-four-month-lag August 2026 first print. I did not find a separate future-dated CMS placeholder in the sandbox; I keep the target's date and bind scoring to the first official CMS dataset print.

Review disposition: accepted the blocking March-data critique by checking the official CMS datastore path again and explicitly treating March 2026 Delaware as unavailable/unusable because DNS blocked data.medicaid.gov and no local official-source-derived March row was present. Accepted the optional skipped-month and limited-sample uncertainty clarifications; no numerical update was made without a usable March value.