Children’s health insurance program in Alabama receives great scores

Children’s Health Insurance Program

A recent study has shown that kids in the state are receiving some of the best coverage in the country.

A study has now been released from Georgetown University, which has determined that when it comes to the states throughout the South, it was Alabama that was providing the best children’s health insurance.

Alabama also found itself among the leading states in the country for providing those kids’ health plans.

The report was created by the Center for Children and Families (CCF) at the university. It explained that children’s health insurance covered all but 4.3 percent of the kids in Alabama. This was the best figure seen throughout the Southern states, and it placed the state in the tenth highest position throughout the entire country’s 50 states and the District of Columbia. The report also underscored the progress that the state has made, as the number of uninsured kids in the state had been 18 percent in 2011.

The study gives a great deal of the credit to Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) in Alabama.

children's Health InsuranceIn the state, CHIP is actually known as ALL Kids. It is a program that offers coverage to children within families whose incomes are up to 300 percent of the poverty level. For a family of four, this would mean an income of about $71,550 per year or less. The families that enrolled into the ALL Kids program were able to pay for their health insurance premiums on a sliding scale, depending on the size of their incomes.

According to the CFF’s executive director, Joan Alker, who is also one of the study’s co-authors, Alabama was a state that had done well in “reducing red tape barriers” to their CHIP. She added “What makes a difference at the state level is whether the state puts out the welcome mat for children and families,” which she said came in the form of certain efforts such as accepting electronic applications, accepting application submissions over the phone, and simply making it easy for children and families to e able to enroll, overall.

Alker said that Cathy Caldwell, the director of the ALL Kids children’s health insurance program should be credited with having done some “very excellent work” in making sure that those efforts were indeed made within the state.

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