Despite the more than 100,000 people dropped from Pennsylvania’s Medicaid rolls since August, the state’s overall Medicaid enrollment has risen, not fallen.

Most of the newly enrolled participants are adults, not children.  The number of Medicaid-eligible children in Pennsylvania has declined.

Meanwhile, the state’s Department of Public Welfare has introduced a new methodology for counting Medicaid enrollment but is not disclosing that methodology.

Learn more about recent trends in Medicaid enrollment in Pennsylvania in this Philadelphia Inquirer article.

Nearly 90,000 children have lost Medicaid coverage since last August, according to a report in the Philadelphia Inquirer – approximately eight percent of all children in the state eligible to participate in the program.

Another 23,000 were dropped but later had their eligibility restored.

While some of the cases of lost coverage appear to be due to the changing financial situation of families, larger numbers appear to the result of paperwork issues – either families failing to provide documentation to prove eligibility or state offices failing to process paperwork in a timely manner.

Read more about this loss of Medicaid eligibility, why it has occurred, and what public officials and others are saying about it in this Philadelphia Inquirer report.

The proliferation of hospital construction nation-wide has some Pennsylvania lawmakers contemplating reviving the state’s certificate-of-need (CON) laws.

Interest among state legislators was spurred by a series of articles in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, including a report of a new hospital in southwestern Pennsylvania that will open in mid-2012 less than a mile from an existing article.

Read about this renewed interest in CON in Pennsylvania here.

Across the country, hospitals are building or rebuilding, spending $17 billion on construction in the past two years alone.

Is this a good idea?  Is the construction necessary or wasteful?  The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review takes a look at the issue in this article.

More than 150,000 Pennsylvanians have been dropped from the state’s Medicaid rolls since the summer, according to the state’s Department of Public Welfare.

According to state officials, most of those who have been dropped have died, left Pennsylvania, or no longer meet the program’s eligibility requirements.

Critics of the purge blame the reductions on an understaffed bureaucracy that lacks the resources to process the paperwork that recipients have submitted to document their continued eligibility.

Learn more about the issue in this Philadelphia Inquirer article.