Push Begins to Make Sure That EVERY Philadelphia Child Has Health Insurance Coverage
(Philadelphia, PA) June 07, 2010 – With some students in Philadelphia high schools going without health insurance, Public Citizens for Children and Youth, the region’s leading children’s advocacy organization, has begun a campaign targeting parents to enroll them in the two available public insurance plans.
A yearlong effort to sign up as many students as possible into CHIP or Medicaid, PCCY’s Student Health Insurance Enrollment and Renewal Initiative will concentrate initially on three high schools located in south Philadelphia: Bok, Furness and South Philadelphia.
The schools were chosen for specific reasons, says PCCY Health Director Colleen McCauley, noting that older students are less likely than younger students to have insurance, and they have large populations of immigrant Asian and Hispanic students.
“These are traditionally hard-to-reach students who live in families with low incomes,” she explains, noting a household income at 200 percent of the federal poverty level ($44,100 for a family of four). “We are concerned that parents whose first language is not English may not know that free public health insurance exists.”
According to a state Department of Insurance study, Philadelphia County has the largest number of uninsured children, 26,012, in Pennsylvania. Some of their parents are unaware of CHIP and MA. Also, the majority of the advertisements are in English and occasionally in Spanish.
To spread the word about the campaign PCCY is distributing flyers to the schools’ counselors and nurses, and meeting with the faculty asking them to pass them out to the kids (2,800 total), and make them aware that there is no need to be uninsured. Printed in six languages, Chinese, Spanish, Cambodian, Indonesian, Vietnamese and English, the flyers have a phone number to PCCY; applications for the kids will be taken over the phone. Bok included the flyers along with the interim report cards mailed to the students’ homes.
The hope is that PCCY can enroll at least 60 percent of the uninsured kids in the three target schools and that knowledge of the program will spread throughout the entire district. (All children qualify for CHIP or MA regardless of their parents’ income.)
“We’re trying to catch as many parents as we can before school ends,” McCauley says. “Summer is prime time for injuries, plus kids will need back-to-school immunizations, checkups and physical exams for sports. Their parents need to have peace of mind that their children are insured.”