By: O. Marion Burton, MD, FAAP, president, American Academy of Pediatrics

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), representing 60,000 pediatricians, commemorates today’s second anniversary of the enactment of the Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act (CHIPRA), one of the most important pieces of legislation for children in the last decade.

We have a lot to celebrate when it comes to our children’s health. CHIPRA has:

• Given more than $30 billion in federal funding to care for an additional 4 million children who would otherwise be uninsured;
• Established a Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission to inform Congress about their access to care;
• Emphasized enrolling children from low-income families; and
• Set forth a historic commitment to improving health care quality for children, among many other important reforms.

As families lost their jobs and their insurance coverage in one of the worst economic recessions in American history, CHIP and Medicaid brought peace of mind. Together, CHIP and Medicaid covered more than 42 million children this past year, with more than 2.2 million previously uninsured children served by these two programs in fiscal year 2010 alone.

CHIPRA placed a national spotlight on children’s health and helped pave the way for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the Affordable Care Act. Together, these laws have benefitted millions more children and adolescents across the country by strengthening the Medicaid program during the economic crisis and fundamentally reforming the U.S. health care system.

While these are tremendous accomplishments, there is still work left to do. This week, the Commonwealth Fund released its 2011 State Scorecard on Child Health System Performance, which shows that while children's health insurance coverage has expanded in many states over the past decade, the number of uninsured children continues to vary state-by-state, impacting children’s access to care and overall health outcomes. Listen to a podcast that I participated in along with AAP’s Immediate Past President Judy Palfrey, MD, FAAP, to discuss what the findings mean for children.

In an effort to help address these disparities in state-by-state coverage, the AAP has joined the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Connecting Kids to Coverage Challenge, a five-year campaign aiming to enroll the 5 million children who are eligible but not enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP,.

Medicaid and CHIP—the bedrocks of our children’s health— must be strengthened and preserved to assure access to care for millions of children.

The AAP looks forward to working with Congress and the Administration to build from the foundation laid by CHIPRA two years ago. We must keep children’s health our highest national priority.