Skip to main content
University of Wisconsin–Madison
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty

Children’s Health Insurance Coverage

Posted on by
  • Health care program aims to cover uninsured children, By Patricia Anstett, September 3, 2010, Detroit Free Press: “As millions of children return to school, health leaders today launched an unprecedented national campaign to enroll 5 million uninsured children nationwide – including 172,000 in Michigan – in free or low-cost health insurance programs. Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said the Connecting Kids to Coverage Challenge was timed to coincide with the opening of schools because ‘no child should be unable to read a book because their vision was not checked’ or be unable to participate in school sports because he or she didn’t have affordable coverage to pay for a sports physical. The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid is giving grants to states to help enroll more children in insurance programs…”
  • Participation in Children’s Health Insurance Program varies widely across country, By Phil Galewitz, September 3, 2010, Kaiser Health News: “The hunt for the nearly 5 million uninsured U.S. children who are eligible for free or low-cost coverage through Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program just got a road map. A new study published today in Health Affairs shows that 39 percent of the uninsured but eligible kids live in three states: California, Texas and Florida. Another 22 percent live in Georgia, New York, Arizona, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania and North Carolina. That’s not a big surprise, because those states have more than half of all children in the country, according to the researchers at the Urban Institute, a non-partisan think tank in Washington. The study’s real value was showing that the states with the lowest participation rates in Medicaid and CHIP were largely in the Rocky Mountain region and Florida. While the national participation rate in Medicaid/CHIP was 82 percent, five states had participation rates below 70 percent: Nevada (55.4 percent), Utah (66.2 percent), Colorado (68.9 percent), Montana (69.3 percent) and Florida (69.8 percent). In contrast, the study showed the states with highest participation rates are Massachusetts (95 percent), Vermont (94 percent) and Maine (92 percent)…”