New Ways to Enroll Kids in Medicaid and CHIP

Traditionally, state and local Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) staff have conducted outreach to uninsured children eligible to help enroll them into these public coverage options. Advocates have also organized public education campaigns and enrollment events. Despite dramatic progress in improving children’s coverage rates over the past fifteen years, limited resources and challenges related to finding these often hard-to-reach children have left nearly 4 million uninsured eligible children unenrolled in these programs as of 2012.