On behalf of the National Academy for State Health Policy (NASHP) and the Maximizing Enrollment: Transforming State Health Coverage program, we are writing to convey our commitment to join Secretary Sebelius’ Connecting Kids to Coverage Challenge to enroll the remaining 5 million eligible but uninsured children into Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) over the next five years.

Maximizing Enrollment: Transforming State Health Coverage, a four year $15 million initiative of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, was launched in 2009 to help states move the needle on enrollment and retention of eligible children into public programs like Medicaid and CHIP, establish best practices and document what works.  As the National Program Office, we are working with the program’s eight grantee states (Alabama, Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New York, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin) to better understand the strengths and challenges of their enrollment and retention systems and implement improvement goals that will have a lasting impact in reducing the number of eligible but uninsured children.  Key strategies our grantees are implementing include:

• Streamlining and simplifying their enrollment and renewal processes and policies;
• Forging stronger interagency linkages to reach more families and use data and other resources more effectively;
• Strengthening their analytic capacity for program management and decision-making by utilizing available technology;
• Ensuring a client-centered organizational culture;
• Building non-governmental partnerships and outreach; and
• Sustaining state leadership’s support of children’s coverage even through difficult fiscal times by achieving further efficiency within these programs.

Although these efforts have begun only recently, the program’s state grantees have made significant strides in making it easier than ever to enroll and retain children in Medicaid and CHIP programs. Groundbreaking achievements attributable to our grantees’ work with the Maximizing Enrollment program include:

• Louisiana’s implementation of Express Lane Eligibility, which has resulted in nearly 14,000 new enrollees;
• Massachusetts’ effort to reduce paperwork at renewal;
• Virginia’s increased use of technology allowing for electronic signatures and an online renewal option; and
• Alabama’s efforts to improve and expand the use of kiosks with language assistance technology for families to easily access application assistance in remote locations.

We are spreading the lessons learned by the Maximizing Enrollment grantees to other states and sharing them with federal policy makers and other key partners. NASHP’s work with all of the nation’s state CHIP programs provides another vehicle for us to disseminate ideas and support efforts to meet this critical challenge. Through these and other efforts in the coming years, NASHP looks forward to working with you, other federal agencies, and our state partners to achieve our shared goal of providing health coverage to all eligible children by 2015. We thank you for your leadership on this issue and stand ready to help you move this initiative forward.