Expanding Coverage for Children: The Santa Clara County Children's Health Initiative. Trends in Insurance Coverage, Issue Brief #3

This brief is based on Mathematica’s evaluation of the Santa Clara County Children’s Health Initiative (CHI), an ambitious effort launched in January 2001 to extend health coverage to all uninsured children in Santa Clara County, California. A coalition of community organizations, county agencies, and the local Medicaid health plan developed the initiative to improve the health and well-being of low-income children in the county. CHI has two parts; the first is a new insurance product, Healthy Kids, which covers children with incomes up to 300 percent of the federal poverty level who are ineligible for the two major state insurance programs, Medi-Cal and Healthy Families. Current enrollment in Healthy Kids is about 13,000. The second part of CHI—a comprehensive outreach campaign built on the message that all children under 300 percent of poverty are eligible for coverage—finds uninsured children and enrolls them in the public program for which they are eligible.