November 20, 2013
By Troy Wilde,
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – New Mexico has a growing number of children with health insurance, according to new research from the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families.
More than 11,000 children gained health insurance between 2010 and 2012, according to the report. Most states have taken steps to reach out to low-income families through programs such as Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, the study found.
Given the momentum, said Sireesah Manne, managing attorney for health care at the New Mexico Center on Law and Poverty, the state should continue to insure more children.
“We haven’t made as much progress as we could have made in the last few years,” she said. “We are hopeful that the state is going to change some strategies and do some more things to make that a reality.”
New Mexico’s rate of uninsured children is 8 percent, which means about 41,000 kids still don’t have health coverage.
A poll released with the Georgetown study found that a majority of Americans believe fewer children have health coverage now than in years past – when just the opposite is true. Partly as a result of CHIP and Medicaid, more than 1.6 million more children nationwide are covered now than in 2008.
The uninsured rate is a little higher among rural children, said Joan Alker, executive director of the Georgetown Center, but it’s highest among Latino children. Language barriers might be partly to blame, she said, but it’s also an outreach problem.
“We may be seeing children who are in mixed-status families, where the children are citizens but their parents may be immigrants,” she said. “We may have families, if there are immigrant parents, who are very reluctant to engage with the government and indeed, fearful to engage with the government.”
The report said Massachusetts has the nation’s highest rate of insured children while Nevada has the lowest.
The report and poll are online at ccf.georgetown.edu.
