If Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) simply retained all children who are enrolled and have no alternative coverage in a given year, the number of uninsured children in the United States would fall by one-third, according to research published July 26 on the Health Affairs web site.
The new study, by Benjamin Sommers of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, finds that one-third of all children who were uninsured in 2006 had lost Medicaid or SCHIP coverage in the previous year. Also, the percentage of uninsured children who had lost public coverage in the previous year rose from 20 percent in 2001 to 33 percent in 2006, and the percentage of uninsured children eligible for these programs who had lost coverage in the previous year rose from 27 percent in 2001 to 42 percent in 2006.
“Unfortunately, the trend of increasing dropout is likely to accelerate because of the new 2006 federal requirement of increased citizenship documentation for Medicaid renewal,” which already appears to be causing decreases in public coverage, says Sommers. He calls for simplifying the Medicaid and SCHIP renewal processes as much as possible, and perhaps integrating Medicaid and SCHIP in states that currently run them as two separate programs. Read the abstract.
