Child Health

The Covering Kids and Families program was a national initiative of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to reduce the number of eligible but uninsured children and adults through enrollment in Medicaid and SCHIP. This report presents trends in media use and in-person outreach conducted by state grantees and local projects funded through the initiative. While grantees faced funding and staffing limitations, demand for their services remained high due to decreases in state-funded outreach. Grantees stretched their resources by partnering with other organizations, relying heavily on media outreach to reach large numbers of families, and performing outreach at already-established events.

Overall, the Los Angeles Healthy Kids program has greatly improved coverage and access to dental care services for children enrolled in the program. However, as with many public insurance programs, the Los Angeles Healthy Kids program has been confronted with numerous challenges in meeting the dental care needs of program enrollees, such as initially assigning different dentists to some enrollees than they had selected, confusion over charges for dental services and underreporting of encounter data.

Hispanics in the United States increasingly fuel the nation's economic engine, especially as their labor-force participation grows and baby boomers retire. Yet, educational, political, residential, and cultural challenges facing Hispanic children are likely to hamper their future achievements, say contributors to Growing Up Hispanic: Health and Development of Children of Immigrants. The volume examines how neighborhood, family, school, and community affect these children's development and well-being.

For 25 years, low-income, non-citizen Los Angeles County residents ineligible for Medi-Cal coverage have had access to emergency, pregnancy-related, and nursing home services through the Emergency Medi-Cal (EMC) program. With the 2003 creation of Healthy Kids, many children enrolled in EMC became eligible for more comprehensive coverage under Healthy Kids. But no formal mechanism was established to coordinate the programs, and the potential for children to be enrolled in both Healthy Kids and EMC was created. This study examines the benefits and challenges created by dual coverage and efforts made to capture state and federal funds to support Healthy Kids.

Children enrolling for a medical reason in Healthy Kids reported a range of common conditions including allergies, anemia, asthma, cough/cold, stomach problems, and ear/eye infection as their reason for enrollment. A large portion (67%) of parents report enrolling because the child needed prescription medication the family could not afford. Enrollment was associated with improved access to health care and lower out-of-pocket costs. However, families of children enrolled for a medical reason faced persistent barriers in accessing sub-specialty care and demonstrated higher use of emergency department services compared to those not enrolled for a medical reason. Los Angeles, CA: University of California – Los Angeles. May 2009.