A new brief from the Urban Institute suggests that more children from lower income families are enrolling in state Medicaid or State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) programs. The authors looked at recent data from the American Community Survey to reach this conclusion.
They found that in the U.S. in 2011, 87.2% of those children who were eligible for either program were enrolled, a 5.5% increase over 2008. Connecticut’s combined enrollment percentage was 94.7%.
With these improvements, the researchers noted, came a concomitant decrease in the number of children eligible for Medicaid or SCHIP but uninsured. In 2011, there were 4 million of such children, a drop from 4.9 million children in 2008.
The brief also points to enrollment and uninsured rate disparities. While Connecticut had a relatively low number of still uninsured eligible children (14,000), Texas and California each had nearly 600,000 such children.
