Louisiana 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 69.8 (02/26); mean monthly change over trailing window -1.02pp; damped six-month projection = 66.7.

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 Louisiana state row, not a national weighted average: the original first-publication August 2026 reporting-period row in the CMS eligibility processing dataset. The target is the share of completed Medicaid renewals processed ex parte, reported in percent and rounded to one decimal.

Base-rate/reference class: the most relevant outside view is Louisiana's own recent original-submission CMS eligibility-processing run because this resolves a single state row. The five inspected values average 69.7 percent, span 65.5 to 75.1 percent, and the latest inspected point is 69.8 percent.

Level, momentum, and mechanism: Louisiana is not near the 100 percent ceiling, so both improvement and deterioration remain plausible. The January spike to 75.1 followed by February at 69.8 looks more like renewal-cohort or processing volatility than a clean trend break; data-match coverage and eligibility-system operations remain the key mechanism.

Prior/update/interval: prior model is Louisiana latest-value persistence blended with a five-point state mean and damped local trend, using observed values from 2025-07, 2025-09, 2025-11, 2026-01, and 2026-02. Starting from latest 69.8, I subtract 1.4 pp for weak July-to-February drift and the January-to-February pullback, subtract 0.6 pp for August renewal-cohort/manual-processing risk, and subtract 0.4 pp because the recent mean does not confirm January's high as durable, yielding 67.4. The 80% interval starts from realized first-print dispersion, with 9.6 pp recent range and 5.3 pp mean absolute adjacent move, then widens over the six-month horizon to about 14 pp each side.

Counter-consideration: upside outside the interval would require Louisiana's January 2026 high to be a durable automation step plus an August cohort that is easy to renew ex parte, pushing the first print above 81.5 percent. Downside outside the interval would require a manual-heavy renewal cohort, data-source outage, eligibility-system issue, or reporting break pushing the share below 53.2 percent.

Historical mean = (71.9 + 65.5 + 66.1 + 75.1 + 69.8) / 5 = 69.7 percent. Observed adjacent changes were -6.4, +0.6, +9.0, and -5.3 pp, with mean absolute change 5.3 pp. Point calculation: 69.8 latest inspected value - 1.4 pp damped drift/pullback - 0.6 pp cohort risk - 0.4 pp mean-reversion adjustment = 67.4 percent. Interval calculation: center 67.4, lower half-width 14.2 pp and upper half-width 14.1 pp, yielding 53.2 to 81.5 after one-decimal rounding.

Prior-run update: a public local Thesis analyst run earlier on 2026-07-01 produced the same 67.4 point and 53.2 to 81.5 interval. I used it only as a consistency check, not as ground truth; the current official-page check still supports the same release vehicle and no new Louisiana official observation changed the forecast.

Resolution-date note: the official Medicaid.gov page verified the monthly data.Medicaid.gov release vehicle and current May 29, 2026 update cycle, but I did not find a separate future-dated CMS placeholder for the exact August 2026 Louisiana row in this sandbox. I keep the forecast tied to the canonical ledger resolutionDate 2026-12-15 and bind resolution to the first official CMS dataset print.