Last week MomsRising announced Wellness Wonder Teams whose mission is to get the word out about health insurance exchanges.
This week Health and Human Services awarded $33 million in grant money to get more children enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP.
Organizations ranging from Los Angeles Unified School District ($974,929) to Farmworker Justice ($777,468) to United American Indian Involvement ($313,422) to Covering Kids & Families of Indiana Inc. ($997,810) won grant money. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is awarding 41 grants to state governments and organizations in 22 states.
The kneejerk reaction to all this spending is really? Millions of marketing dollars? But the answer is yes, definitely. Millions. People don’t know the options are out there.
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It’s hard to believe that some people don’t realize Obamacare is alive and well, but it seems to be true. In a recent Kaiser poll, 19% thought the law had been overturned by Congress or the Supreme Court.
From the Washington Post:
Most Americans likely to access new health care programs under the Affordable Care Act—either through subsidized private insurance or the Medicaid expansion — say they don’t have enough information to understand “how it [the health law] will impact you and your family.”
This poll does, however, show greater awareness than separate research conducted last winter by Enroll America, a new non-profit that’s leading much of the outreach effort. It found that 78 percent of Americans likely to gain access to health coverage had no idea that such programs would roll out in 2014.
Even if you think the ACA is single payer in disguise, we should at least support the investment we’ve made so far as a country. What a terrible waste it would be if we sunk all this money into exchanges and still had to pick up the tab for uninsured people who use the ER as a primary care office. I know the House is still voting symbolically against the ACA, but it really is time to move on.
The money for this outreach work comes from ACA. The idea is to help some of the 7.9 million kids in America who don’t have insurance. Grants went to groups working in five primary focus areas:
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- Engaging schools in outreach, enrollment and retention activities (9 awards)
- Bridging health coverage disparities by reaching out to subgroups of children that exhibit lower-than-average health coverage rates (8 awards)
- Designing and executing targeted enrollment strategies to streamline health coverage enrollment for individuals participating in other public benefit programs such as food nutritional programs or other assistance programs (3 awards)
- Establishing and developing application assistance resources to provide high quality, reliable Medicaid and CHIP enrollment and renewal services in local communities (13 awards)
- Conducting training programs to equip communities to help families understand the new application and enrollment system and to deliver effective assistance to families with children eligible for Medicaid or CHIP (8 awards).
The average grant award is $775,000, with a range of $190,000 to $1 million. HHS made sure that money went to the eight states that account for 55% of eligible but unenrolled kids: California, Texas, Florida, Georgia, New York, Arizona, Illinois and Indiana.
States that received more than one grant include California (9), New York (5), Texas (3), Pennsylvania (3) and Georgia (2). See the chart below for the full list of grants.
In addition to public health workers spreading the word about CHIP, many advocacy groups are promoting health insurance exchanges. MomsRising.org is reaching out to its more than one million members to encourage them to help spread the word about affordable health care options. Members who join the MomsRising.org Wellness Wonder Team effort will help spread the word to at least ten people.
[Graphic from HHS]
