Enrollment is holding steady, says Eric C. Hunter, MBA, president and CEO of CareOregon

The end of continuous enrollment in Medicaid programs in 2023 has resulted in a 19% decrease in the number of people covered by Medicaid nationwide, from 94.3 million in March 2023 to 76 million in November 2025, according to KFF. But in Oregon, enrollment during that same period fell by just 7%, from 1.4 million to 1.3 million.

“One advantage of being in Oregon is that we pride ourselves on the number and percentage of our citizens who have health insurance. We typically stay at 96% and 97% of the population being insured, and we're still at 96% to 97%. But we had to be creative to do that,” says Eric Hunter, MBA, president and CEO of CareOregon, the largest Medicaid managed care organization in the state, during an extensive interview with Managed Healthcare Executive (MHE). Hunter is a member of the MHE editorial advisory board.

Continuous enrollment was part of the public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The effects of it ending — “redetermination” or “unwinding” is the shorthand term — were blunted in Oregon because the state staggered the effort so the people who were hardest to re-enroll were dealt with last.
says Hunter. “We had a year to work with them and get them up to speed, so we kept more people enrolled than a lot of states did,” he said.

Oregon also created a bridge program between the core Medicaid program and the Affordable Care Act exchanges that allowed people whose income was up to 200% of the federal poverty limit to be covered by Medicaid, Hunter explained.

CareOregon’s enrollment also benefited from the state’s Healthier Oregon, which provides care for people regardless of their citizenship status; Hunter says his organization has 30,000 of the 130,000 people covered by that program. Another 20,000 people were brought into the CareOregon fold through an arrangement with a Native American managed care organization, according to Hunter.

Altogether, CareOregon “touches” about 600,000, or roughly 1 in 8 peope in the state of Oregon, Hunter said.