In February 2010, we celebrated the one year anniversary of President Obama’s signing of the Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act (CHIPRA) into law. Less than two weeks later, he signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which also provided critical assistance to state Medicaid programs that allowed them to keep providing essential health services during the economic downturn. With these two actions less than a month into his term, President Obama demonstrated this administration’s strong commitment to ensuring America’s children have the quality, affordable health care they need and deserve.
In conjunction with the anniversary, HHS released a progress report on CHIPRA implementation, “CHIPRA One Year Later: Connecting Kids to Coverage.” As this report shows, those steps have already had huge benefits for families around the country. In 2009 alone, 2.6 million previously uninsured children were served by Medicaid or CHIP. This is a tremendous accomplishment, but it’s only the beginning. An estimated 5 million children remain eligible for coverage through Medicaid or CHIP under current program rules, but are not enrolled.
The Secretary’s Challenge: Connecting Kids to Coverage is a five-year long campaign that will challenge federal officials, states, governors, mayors, community organizations, faith leaders and concerned individuals to build on our collective success over the past year and take the next step by finding and enrolling those 5 million children in Medicaid and CHIP.
The report provides an important look back at what we’ve accomplished since CHIPRA was enacted. And it talks about some of the tools that are in place to help us do even more for children and families in the years ahead. We look forward to our continuing work with states, our grantees, and members of the policy and research communities to achieve this goal of reaching 5 million children within the next five years.
On February 22, 2010, CMS announced ten federal demonstration grants that will go to 18 states improve health care quality and delivery systems for children in Medicaid and CHIP. The grants will help implement and evaluate provider performance measures and utilize health information technologies to help establish a national quality framework for children’s health care.
In December 2009, CMS awarded more than $72 million nine states for making significant progress in enrolling children in health coverage and improving access to children’s coverage through Medicaid and CHIP. CHIPRA allocated funding for these performance bonuses to be paid to qualifying States each year from 2009 to 2013 for making their programs more family friendly.
Speaker presentations and transcripts from the National Children’s Health Insurance Summit are available online. The two and a half day Summit included 20 unique sessions on enrollment and retention in children’s health insurance programs. Session topics ranged from presumptive eligibility and rural outreach to social media tactics and cultural competency. In total, 84 presentations were given and are now here as a resource for you. Please forward to your colleagues the link to these resources, especially those who were unable to attend the Summit.
Want to help spread the word about CHIP and Medicaid in your state? Add the new Insure Kids Now! widget to your Web site. Click on the widget image on the bottom right corner of the InsureKidsNow.gov Web page and follow the instructions provided. The widget, available in both English and Spanish, includes a graphic and a link that allows visitors to quickly find information about programs by state.
You can also help your peers by posting our toolkit widget on your site and linking them directly to “Children’s Health Insurance: Tools to Advance Enrollment and Retention Efforts”. It works the same way, click on the widget image and follow the instructions provided.
Toolkit materials are available in Spanish, and this month more were added in Korean, Simplified Chinese and Vietnamese. These materials are designed to be customized and localized for distribution to your community.
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