November 25, 2013
By Troy Wilde
LAS VEGAS, Nev. – Nevada has more children without health insurance than any other state, a new report has revealed. The Georgetown University Center for Children and Families (CCF) study said about 17 percent of Nevada kids lack health coverage, compared with a national rate of just over 7 percent. Most states have taken steps to reach out to low-income families through programs such as Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), it noted.
Amanda Haboush, senior research associate, Nevada Institute for Children’s Research and Policy, said Nevada is expanding Medicaid and also has CHIP. However, she said, the challenge is that many adults may not know they’re eligible for the program.
“We have a very diverse population here,” she explained, “and not a lot of parents necessarily understand how to get their children enrolled in public insurance.”
Nevada has about 110,000 children without health insurance; 5,000 children have been enrolled since 2010, the report said.
Joan Alker, executive director, Georgetown CCF, said the uninsured rate is a little higher among rural children and highest among Latino children, at nearly 57 percent in Nevada. 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. 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,” Alker said.
A poll released with the Georgetown study found that the 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, nationwide more than 1.6 million more children are covered now than in 2008.
