Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has called on states and communities to help find and enroll the 5 million currently uninsured children eligible for Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
Sebelius made her plea as she opened the National Children’s Health Insurance Summit in Chicago, kicking off the nation’s largest campaign to find and enroll uninsured children in more than a decade.
“As a society and as parents, we have no greater responsibility than to provide quality healthcare for our children,” she said. “Our charge here today is to get all eligible children covered to ensure they are healthy throughout their childhood. A healthy child is the block upon which all other successes are built, not just for the child, but for the nation they will lead in the future.”
Enactment of the Children’s Health Insurance Reauthorization Act (CHIPRA) created new opportunities to move forward, she said, but given the economic downturn, the need among families for affordable coverage is at a high.
President Barack Obama signed CHIPRA into law in February, fully funding CHIP for the next four years and giving an “unprecedented amount” of federal funding to support outreach and enrollment efforts for both CHIP and Medicaid. Currently, Medicaid serves more than 32 million low-income American children, while CHIP has more than 7 million beneficiaries.
Sebelius’ speech launched a three-day conference in Chicago that has brought together state Medicaid and CHIP officials, local government, community-based organizations, safety net providers and others who are working to promote enrollment in children’s health programs. These experts will disucss strategies for finding and enrolling children in health programs as well as removing barriers that sometimes prevent children from staying in these programs despite continued eligibility.
“With the nation’s unemployment rate at a staggering 9.8 percent and families losing their job-related healthcare, finding and enrolling eligible children could never be more important,” said Cindy Mann, director of the Center for Medicaid and State Operations, part of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. “Bringing together government officials, tribal leaders, community organizations and policy experts, we hope, will build on the successes achieved in recent years and lead to fresh, innovative and successful strategies to deliver quality healthcare to every eligible child in America.”