Federal health program dramatically reduced rolls of uninsured children
Gannett News Service
WASHINGTON — The State Children’s Health Insurance Program has made significant strides in reducing the number of uninsured children nationwide since it was created in 1997.
Under the program, states receive grant money to insure children whose families earn incomes of up to 200 percent of the federal poverty level, or $30,520 for a family of three in 2003. The program requires states to match the federal dollars with money of their own. States that don’t come up with matching funds risk losing the federal money to other states.
That approach, combined with the desire of many public officials to help poor children, led to rapid growth in S-CHIP before budget shortfalls recently led states to begin spending less on the program.
Between 1999 and 2002, the number of uninsured children under age 19 fell by an estimated 1.8 million. And the uninsured rate for all 77 million children in the country improved by 2.5 percentage points over the same period, dropping from 12.6 percent in 1999 to 10.1 percent in 2002. Policy experts attribute that trend, in part, to the S-CHIP program.
The trend improvement came despite the downturn in the economy, an increase in employers eliminating health insurance benefits for workers, and an increase in the total number of Americans without health insurance.
An estimated 3.9 million children are now enrolled in S-CHIP programs in all 50 states, according to a December report from the Kaiser Family Foundation.