By Suzie Shupe and Edgar Aguilar, California Coverage and Health Initiatives
California is the most populous state in the union and home to more than 13 percent of the nation’s uninsured children. Since coverage is essential for making sure children reach their full potential, California Coverage & Health Initiatives (CCHI) is honored to receive a $750,900 Connecting Kids to Coverage Outreach and Enrollment Grant that will help us bring more low-income, eligible California children into health coverage.
CCHI has been working for over a decade to ensure children and families have the security of coverage and access to quality care. Our member organizations reach Californians in over 90% of California counties, helping to promote a robust culture of coverage and expand coverage to all children and families in our state. This video highlights who we are and why we are committed to this work.
This new funding will help us focus more of our energy and efforts on counties in California’s Central Valley and Inland Empire regions, where high concentrations of uninsured Latino children and their families live, work and play. CCHI, together with our local member organizations, will work closely with leading Spanish-language media outlets, trusted sources of news and information for Latino communities, to publicize community education and enrollment events. Helping these families learn about their coverage options and how to enroll is crucial to the success of health care reform. We know we can see more children grow up healthy and succeed in life as a result of the opportunities in the Affordable Care Act.
CCHI will also mobilize, coordinate and provide training and “on-the-ground” technical assistance to application assistors in targeted regions with the goal of enrolling tens of thousands of children into Medi-Cal. Collectively we have already covered more than 165,000 previously uninsured children through locally-funded programs and we connect another 125,000 children each year to the Medi-Cal and Healthy Families programs. Our statewide network has firsthand experience enrolling children into public coverage programs and we know that coverage for all children in California is a worthy and achievable goal.
We look forward to leveraging this new opportunity to get Californians the coverage they need, and to new opportunities just over the horizon to connect kids to coverage as a result of the Affordable Care Act. This work promises to move our state toward a brighter and more productive future, and CCHI is proud to be a part of it.
[Related Content: Read Tricia Brook’s blog on the grant announcement.]
