New Jersey’s health insurance programs for poor children still are not reaching all the kids who ought to benefit, a new analysis shows, and 150,000 children under age 18 in the state remain uninsured.
More than two-thirds of the state’s uninsured children have at least one parent who is employed full time. The majority are U.S. citizens whose parents are also U.S. citizens. The largest demographic group is Hispanic (59,000), followed by white (46,000) and African-American (30,000). They are more likely to be boys and over 13 years old.
That picture emerged Friday as Kathleen Sibelius, the secretary of health and human services, called upon states to enroll 5 million children in Medicaid and the federal Children Health Insurance Program within five years. Citing a study released Friday by the Urban Institute, she said that 65 percent of the nation’s 7.3 million uninsured children were actually eligible for those two programs, but they were not enrolled.
Although the number of uninsured children nationwide is the lowest it’s been in 20 years, an all-out effort is needed to get them into the programs for which they’re entitled, she said. The largest concentrations of uninsured children are in California, Florida and Texas.
“No child should be starting school unable to read because her vision hasn’t been corrected,” said Cindy Mann, a federal official who oversees Medicaid and CHIP, at a related press conference. “No child should be unable to participate in sports because his family doesn’t have enough money to pay for a physical exam. Children don’t need to wait for coverage.”
The report provides “further understanding about who the children are that we need to reach and where they are located,” said Pam Ronan, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Human Services, which administers Medicaid and FamilyCare, as the federally subsidized health insurance program is known here.
Detailed maps developed by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in its “Uninsured Children” report, also released Friday, show that 9.5 percent of Paterson’s children are uninsured, 3.9 percent of Hackensack’s, and 8.4 percent of those in northeastern Bergen County.
Only 81.4 percent of the eligible children in New Jersey in 2008 were enrolled in Medicaid and FamilyCare, the report said. That was the same as the national average, and far below the 95 percent participation rates in the District of Columbia, Massachusetts and Vermont. New Jersey’s participation was also lower than in New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Delaware.
Many more children have become insured since the 2008 data cited in the study, Ronan said.
Last year, former Gov. Jon Corzine made the campaign to expand children’s coverage a centerpiece of his unsuccessful bid for reelection, and the state also received a federal grant to boost enrollment during an appearance in Paterson by Sibelius.
That funded a program called Express Lane Eligibility that uses tax forms and other official databases with income information to discern if a child is eligible.
It’s too early to determine how effective that has been, said Mann, the federal Medicaid official.
“We’re working closely with New Jersey and eager to get some results that we’ll share with other states,” she said.
E-mail: washburn@northjersey.com
