Today the Biden administration announced $49 million in grants to help community groups sign more families and children up for health insurance – especially the more than half of the country’s 4 million uninsured children who qualify for free coverage through Medicaid or CHIP, the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
“This is our largest investment to date in this type of initiative,” says Chiquita Brooks-Lasure, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. “So many children, even though they’re eligible, don’t know it – their parents don’t know that they are eligible for coverage – there still needs to be so much education done.”
She points to the Biden administration’s successes in boosting private insurance enrollment by investing in outreach workers who can walk people through the enrollment process – one on one – for free. “That’s the same thing that we’re trying to do here with the Connecting Kids to Coverage initiative – really making sure we are using trusted messengers,” she says.
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