Today, I’m thrilled that we are awarding nearly $32 million to support Connecting Kids to Coverage Outreach and Enrollment Grants.

Our ongoing partnerships with states and communities to connect eligible children to health coverage have taught us valuable lessons about how to conduct effective outreach – outreach that not only raises awareness of health coverage opportunities, but also gets eligible people enrolled.  We are applying these lessons to our work going forward so that Americans can get the health coverage they need.

These successes have also prepared the Centers for Medicaid & Medicaid Services for the historic expansion of coverage set to begin this fall, made possible by the Affordable Care Act.  Working closely with our colleagues in the states and at the federal level, these outreach and enrollment strategies will help us enroll millions of Americans in the Health Insurance Marketplaces and state Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Programs.

Today’s grants will build on this progress. Some of our outstanding grantees include:

• The California Coverage & Health Initiatives will mobilize, coordinate and provide training and will work closely with the Spanish language community to increase health insurance enrollment for kids.
• The Pima Community Access Program – As a past grantee, this group responded when Arizona reopened enrollment in its KidsCare program by setting up a call center and helped enroll 26,000 children whose families had been waiting to get coverage. This new grant will support their efforts to train over 600 organizations in four counties to help families with the new enrollment process.

Since 2008 children’s health coverage rates have improved dramatically, with millions gaining coverage mainly through Medicaid and CHIP --- despite the economic downturn.

For the past four years we have worked tirelessly to reduce the number of insured children in our country. And thanks to these community groups that we partner with, we can see real results.

To hear their stories, visit the grantees’ blogs at http://blog.cms.gov/

The California Coverage & Health Initiatives blog is also available in Spanish here: http://blog.cms.gov/2013/07/02/a-new-opportunity-to-connect-kids-to-coverage-in-california/

For additional information on today’s announcement visit:http://www.hhs.gov/news/press/2013pres/07/20130702b.html

Cindy Mann is the Deputy Administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and Director of the Centers for Medicaid and CHIP Services

This blogpost was originally published on the CMS website:  http://www.hhs.gov/healthcare/facts/blog/2013/07/connecting-kids-coverage.html