New study on children's eligibility for public insurance

Jul 7 2004

California's Medi-Cal and Healthy Families programs provide health insurance coverage to children under the age of 18, one of the state's most vulnerable populations.

However, over 900,000 children who qualified for either Medi-Cal or Healthy Families did not get enrolled into the programs and remained uninsured for all or part of 2002. These qualified children are spread throughout the state, with wide variations between local areas.

A new policy brief -- "Many Uninsured Children Qualify for Medi-Cal or Healthy Families" -- highlights the geographic variations in uninsured children's Medi- Cal/Healthy Family eligibility rates by state Assembly, Senate and Congressional districts, as well as by counties and the Los Angeles Service Planning Areas (SPAs). Uninsured-and-eligible rates were estimated by applying a small-area methodology to multiple data sources, including the 2001 California Health Interview Survey (CHIS 2001), 2000-2002 Current Population Surveys, and the 2000 Census.

The Brief is available at www.healthpolicy.ucla.edu under "What's New". In addition to the data presented in this policy brief, supplemental exhibits, including children's population profiles by district, can be found at: http://www.healthpolicy.ucla.edu/uninsured-eligibility.html.

This first-of-its-kind information can be used by California's community and health advocacy groups, as well as by legislators to support policy development.

Among the key findings are:

• The areas in the state that had notably high numbers of children who were uninsured- and-eligible for Medi-Cal or Healthy Families in 2002 were located primarily in the greater Southern California and Central Valley regions of the state.
• Nonetheless, almost one out of every three California children who was uninsured-and- eligible lived in an area that had rates at or below the statewide average.

Key Policy Recommendation

• Public and private efforts currently underway to improve the outreach and enrollment of eligible children can be complemented by statewide initiatives such as fully implementing "express lane eligibility" that automatically enrolls children who qualify for free and subsidized school lunches.

The new publication was prepared by Carolyn A Mendez-Luck, Hongjian Yu, Ying-Ying Meng, Jenny Chia, Beth L Newman, Alek Sripipatana, and Steven P Wallace at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.

Valerie Steiner Communications Director UCLA Center for Health Policy Research 10911 Weyburn Avenue Suite 300 Los Angeles, CA 90024 Phone: (310) 794-0930 Fax: (310) 794-2686

www.healthpolicy.ucla.edu