Copyright 1999 The Times-Picayune Publishing Co.
The Times-Picayune
October 27, 1999 Wednesday, ORLEANS
SECTION: METRO; Pg. B6
LENGTH: 471 words
HEADLINE:
PROGRESS ON INSURING CHILDREN
BODY:
Louisiana's
high number of uninsured children is one of the dismal
statistics that cripple our state and push it to the bottom of national
rankings, particularly those that track children's issues.
It's easy to
see why access to health care is considered an important
benchmark. Children who don't get regular checkups, who aren't immunized and who
don't see the doctor or get medicine when they are sick are at a real
disadvantage. Kids who lack health insurance have less of a
chance of getting a healthy start in life, plain and simple. State officials are
taking steps to make Louisiana a healthier place for the young, however, and
that's encouraging. The state Department of Health and Hospitals is making a
concerted effort to enroll eligible children in Medicaid or sign them up for the
Louisiana Children's Health Insurance Program, which provides coverage to
children whose families are poor but not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid.
That program is part of a $24 billion benefits expansion authorized by Congress
in 1997.
The state is working to get the word out, and that's important.
Too many eligible families simply don't know about these programs. DHH put
application forms in stores, hospitals, doctors' offices and churches. The forms
also went home with children in public and parochial schools this fall.
State officials also made it easier to enroll: shortening a 13-page form
to two pages, setting up a toll-free information line and dropping a requirement
to apply in person.
Those good steps have been paying off. When school
started this year, a DHH spokesman said, "We got more phone calls than we've
ever gotten before."
The statistics show improvement, too. Identified in
a 1996 study as one of the 12 worst-performing states for insuring children,
Louisiana has shown more improvement than all but two. As of this June, the
state had signed up 457,422 children, an increase of 35,466 or 8.4 percent. Of
the 12 low performers, only North Carolina and New York improved more, and New
York's percentage was not as great as ours.
That growth is especially
impressive since five other states on the list actually enrolled fewer children
than in 1996, a situation that Families USA blamed on a misinterpretation of
welfare reform law.
To its credit, Louisiana avoided that pitfall,
taking extra steps to make sure that parents knew that their children might
still be eligible for coverage even if they no longer received benefits.
Louisiana has not solved this problem. There are still 200,000 children
in our state who lack insurance, and being near the top of the bottom 12 is not
where we want to be. But the state seems to have found the right prescription:
working aggressively to reach out to poor families and making it as easy as
possible to navigate through the system.
LOAD-DATE: October 27, 1999
