Outreach for Better Health

Last year, Congress appropriated $24 billion to help states provide health insurance to youngsters from working families that have no coverage through Medi-Cal or an employer. California was eligible to receive up to $855 million for the fiscal year ending this September, but the money didn’t start flowing then and there.

Rather, since last October Washington has asked for numerous revisions in the state’s program for using the funds to aid some of California’s estimated 1.7 million uninsured children. On Tuesday, the federal Department of Health and Human Services finally signed off on the plan, called Healthy Families.

California will end up with only a fraction of what it’s eligible for this year, but even so the money should be a huge boon for the state, enabling it to begin extending health insurance coverage to as many as half a million children of working poor families in the next three years. The money should also help the state economy by reducing the burden of uninsured children that now falls on both public and private health care providers.

The state has already targeted the most needy recipients: California children under 19 from families with incomes below 200% of the federal poverty line (that works out to $32,900 for a family of four). The state’s efforts to find those children, however, began only this month, with the launching of an $8-million ad campaign to publicize Healthy Families through billboards, bus boards and TV and radio ads in English and Spanish.

Languages should be added, and more money should be spent on the media campaign overall. State officials are limited by a federal rule that no more than 10% of the new federal dollars be earmarked for both media outreach and administration, but that ought to be relaxed, at least until word of the program is out.

California is spending an additional $12 million on a “person-to-person campaign,” the centerpiece of which is a $25 “application assistance fee” paid to community-based organizations that assist families in signing up eligible children. The state is spreading the word about the fees in meetings at sheriff’s departments, civic clubs and other organizations.

The outreach ought to include logical places to find low-income families without insurance: schools, county health departments, county hospitals and community-based clinics.

In any case, California won’t get the whole $855 million because the state is required to put up one dollar for every two federal dollars provided, and it has proposed allocating only $64 million. The state should spend it well and also begin more ambitious and inclusive outreach efforts. Success this year should help the program grow next year.