Eliminating Barriers to Enrollment in the Children’s Health Insurance Program

In 1997, Congress authorized the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP or CHIP) to decrease the number of uninsured children in the United States. By September 1999 all states had submitted their CHIP plans to and received approval from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Yet, in spite of ambitious efforts on the part of many states to assemble their CHIP programs quickly and to promote them aggressively, only about 20 percent of the estimated five million children thought to be eligible were enrolled in the new program by September 1999. Many advocates hoped that two years after its passage the Children’s Health Insurance Program would have many more children enrolled. In the fall of 1999 The Council of State Governments invited Dr. Lillian Gibbons and Laura Summer to discuss barriers to enrollment in CHIP and strategies available to states to reach and enroll uninsured children. Dr. Lillian Gibbons is the director of outreach for the Children’s Health Initiative in the U.S. Healthcare Financing Administration’s Center for Medicaid and State Operations. She leads the development of partnerships with states and other stakeholders to promote the design and implementation of broad-based, culturally-sensitive outreach strategies. Laura Summer is Deputy Director of the National Academy on An Aging Society, located in Washington, D.C. Before joining the Academy, Ms. Summer conducted research and wrote about health insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, access to healthcare, and methods to reach lowincome families. For five years she directed a national outreach program to increase the enrollment of women and children in the Medicaid program.