U.S. to Begin Health Insurance Outreach

WASHINGTON —  President Clinton today will announce plans to step up federal efforts to enroll more children in existing government health insurance programs.

About 12 million children are without health insurance, or nearly 27% of the 44 million Americans who are uninsured, according to the latest Census Bureau figures.

Clinton is ordering a multi-agency outreach effort aimed at making sure that the federal government informs parents, grandparents and kids about insurance options. Children under age 19, depending on family income, are the focus of the outreach program.

The effort will seek to speed up enrollment for eligible children by reaching them primarily through school-based programs, such as the federally funded school lunch program, and by making it clear that state health agencies can use health program dollars for outreach.

The wide-ranging program will also enlist the help of several private sector companies, including Safeway and K mart, according to White House officials.

“One thing we’ve learned is that it takes work to get children enrolled in these programs,” said Chris Jennings, deputy domestic policy advisor.

“You have to become part of the local community culture . . . It takes time to get there, but we’re starting to make inroads, and the only way to ensure that progress continues is to build on our aggressive outreach,” Jennings said.

The push for getting more children insured comes as the Census Bureau announced that the number of Americans without health insurance is continuing to grow at a rate of about 1 million people annually. Twenty-two percent of Californians are uninsured, and about 1.7 million children statewide lack health insurance, according to 1998 statistics from the National Conference of State Legislatures.

In contrast to adults, many of whom have no affordable health insurance options, about half of all uninsured kids are eligible for government subsidized insurance but they--or their parents--do not know it.

The two government insurance programs for children are Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. The Medicaid program, which is jointly funded by the states and the federal government, is designed to cover children in families at or below the poverty level.

The CHIP program, which was enacted in 1997 and is now in place in all 50 states, is for children in families that have earnings above poverty level but who still cannot afford to buy private health insurance. Each state designs its own program. Some only help families just above the poverty level, while others offer help on a sliding scale to children in families with incomes of as much as 250% of the poverty level.

Even with those programs in place, it has proved difficult to get parents or guardians to sign up children who are eligible. Many parents avoided CHIP because they mistakenly believed it to be a program for welfare recipients. Some states initially had lengthy enrollment forms that daunted parents and discouraged enrollment. And in other states, there was simply little information available.

But many states are starting aggressive efforts to get the word out. For instance, Indiana, Georgia and Illinois are using the schools to provide enrollment information to families, much as Clinton envisioned.

Assisting the effort are companies such as Safeway, which is printing the toll-free number (877)KIDS NOW on 9.1 million grocery bags to be distributed nationwide in 1999-2000. Parents who call will be provided with information about their state’s program.

The interagency effort was prodded along personally by Clinton, who wants to leave a legacy of having reversed the trend of ever-increasing numbers of uninsured children; First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has a long history of involvement in issues concerning children and poverty; and Vice President Al Gore, who has made insuring every child one of the keynotes of his presidential campaign.