Achieving the Success in Massachusetts Would Result in 43,000 Fewer Uninsured Wisconsin Kids

For many years Wisconsin ranked very near the top in the percentage of children who have health insurance, but our state’s high ranking has gradually been slipping. That ranking fell another 3 places in 2012, and we now rank 17th among states on children’s health coverage.

As I noted in a Wisconsin Budget Project blog post yesterday, employer-sponsored health insurance has dropped very substantially in Wisconsin over the last 12 years. Fortunately, BadgerCare has done a very good job of picking up the slack. As a result, the number of uninsured children in Wisconsin has remained relatively steady over the last few years. However,  a new report released today by the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families (CCF), explains that while other states have made significant progress on this critical indicator of child well-being, Wisconsin has not kept pace.

These facts highlight the importance, now more than ever, of eliminating unnecessary barriers to health care coverage. Fortunately, the federal health care reform law can help Wisconsin extend affordable health insurance to many of the 61,000 children who were uninsured last year.“Wisconsin has traditionally been a national leader on children’s coverage, driven in no small part by our smart investments in BadgerCare,” said Ken Taylor, executive director at the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families. “Taking advantage of opportunities to strengthen our homegrown coverage program by improving outreach to uninsured families and streamlining the renewal process will improve the health and economic security of more children and their parents around the state.”

Some of the ways that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) can help Wisconsin slash the number of uninsured children include:

• Improving outreach and enrollment in BadgerCare for the large portion of uninsured children who appear to already be eligible for that coverage.
• Insuring children in families with income above the BadgerCare ceiling (300% of FPL) through the new Health Insurance Marketplace.

The CCF report points out that another way to improve the insurance rate for children is to include all parents up to at least 138% of the poverty level in Medicaid, by using the enhanced federal funding provided by the ACA.  Research shows that when states expand Medicaid for parents, the number of uninsured children falls, because parents are more likely to sign up their eligible children for coverage when the whole family can get coverage.

The 61,000 uninsured Wisconsin children in 2012 amounted to 4.7% of  the kids in our state, compared to just 1.4% in Massachusetts, which has pioneered health care reform. If Wisconsin is able to use the Affordable Care Act to reach the much lower rate achieved in Massachusetts, there would be about 43,000 fewer uninsured children in our state than there are now.

Jon Peacock