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Tennessee: More coverage sought despite budget woes

By: Emily Bregel
(Contact)

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Susan McKay

More than one in 13 children in Tennessee are without health insurance, and most of them come from families with at least one working parent, advocates for improvements in health care said Thursday.

As the state faces a projected $800 million budget shortfall in the current fiscal year, health care programs to help the uninsured will be vulnerable to cuts, said Susan McKay, communications director for the Tennessee Health Care Campaign in Nashville, during a Thursday conference call.

“Everyone is very concerned about what’s happening with economics,” she said. “The importance of talking about the issue of children’s health care right now cannot be overstated.”

A study released Thursday by Families USA, a nonprofit advocacy group dedicated to achieving health care for all Americans, took a closer look at the youngest uninsured residents of Tennessee. Using an aggregate of U.S. Census Bureau data from 2005 to 2007, the report said that 125,000 children, or 8.3 percent of the state’s children, are uninsured. Ninety-one percent of them come from families with at least one parent working to make ends meet, advocates said.

The childhood uninsured rate in Tennessee is better than the national average of 11.1 percent, noted Ron Pollack of Families USA in the conference call discussing the report. But he nevertheless emphasized the need for federal action to support children’s well being in the Volunteer State.

The report’s authors called on Congress to reauthorize the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP, for which three-quarters of the cost is borne by the federal government. The program will be up for reauthorization in March 2009.

In Tennessee the CHIP program is CoverKids, which Gov. Bredesen launched in 2007 to provided coverage for children in families making below 250 percent of the poverty limit who don’t qualify for TennCare.

“For numerous children in Tennessee who count on CoverKids as their health lifeline, and for the 125,000 uninsured children in the state, support for continuing and expanding the Children’s Health Insurance Program is critically important,” Mr. Pollack said.

Right now about 30,000 children are enrolled in CoverKids, and a continued public awareness campaign hopefully will boost those numbers, said Dr. Andrea Willis, director of CoverKids and a pediatrician. Too many families are unaware that their children could qualify for either this program or Medicaid, she said.

“When you start the outreach efforts for the CHIP program, you do uncover a lot of kids that are Medicaid-eligible,” Dr. Willis said.

The Families USA report noted that about 60 percent of uninsured children in Tennessee likely would qualify for either TennCare or CoverKids, and it recommended a “single point of entry” for both programs to more easily get those children into the system.

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