Poster #12 - From Policy to Participation: Cumulative Administrative Exposure in Medicaid and SNAP

• In Event: Friday Poster Reception

Abstract

Recent federal changes to Medicaid and SNAP under H.R. 1 (2025) establish new federal participation rules that are implemented across heterogeneous state administrative systems. While substantive eligibility requirements are federally specified, continued participation depends on repeated interactions with state-specific processes governing verification, reporting, recertification, compliance, and procedural resolution.

Research on administrative burden has established that interactions with public programs impose learning, compliance, and psychological costs, while related work documents recertification, churn, and longitudinal patterns of program participation. Comparing administrative systems nevertheless requires measures capable of representing not only whether administrative encounters occur, but how administrative decision exposure accumulates across a participation trajectory.

This paper introduces Differential Administrative Exposure (DAE), a multidimensional measure of cumulative exposure to repeated administrative decision processes. Rather than treating administrative determinations as isolated events, DAE characterizes exposure trajectories along dimensions including decision frequency, administrative process duration, decision consequence severity, repetition without informational resolution, and contestability deficit.

The measurement approach presented here specifies how these dimensions can be constructed from longitudinal administrative records, including individual-level event histories, program status transitions, decision and verification events, informational novelty, notices, and opportunities for appeal. Medicaid and SNAP provide motivating environments for examining how shared federal requirements may be instantiated through different state administrative architectures and therefore generate different patterns of administrative exposure across individuals and populations.

Differential Administrative Exposure explicitly separates measurement of administrative exposure from estimation of its downstream consequences. DAE is designed as an upstream measurement layer from which subsequent analyses can test relationships among administrative-system design, cumulative exposure, retention, procedural disenrollment, re-enrollment, and participation stability. This separation prevents observed program outcomes from being treated as direct measures of the administrative processes that produced them.

By constructing longitudinal administrative exposure trajectories separately from program participation trajectories, DAE provides a basis for comparing administrative-system configurations, identifying where unresolved exposure accumulates, and studying how implementation structures distribute administrative work and exposure within and across populations. In a policy environment characterized by shared federal requirements and heterogeneous state implementation, cumulative administrative exposure offers a measurement strategy for studying how policy implementation is experienced as an administrative process.

Author

• Mahana Barbadillo, City Of New York
  Presenting Author