HealthSponsoredByFor most of the last 20 years, Wisconsin has been a national leader in the percentage of children with health insurance. Wisconsin no longer has one of the very best rates of insurance coverage for children. A new analysis of the latest Census Bureau data shows that Wisconsin slipped from 6th best in insuring kids in 2008 to 16th in 2014 and now trails each of the four states on its borders.

“Health Care for Kids: How Wisconsin Lost and Could Regain Its National Prominence” released today by the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families (WCCF) concludes that Wisconsin would have had about 11,800 fewer uninsured children in 2014 if it achieved the average uninsured rate in the four neighbor states.
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A key reason why other states have been climbing ahead of Wisconsin is that in the last couple of years they have been doing a better job of increasing the percentage of Medicaid-eligible children who are actually participating. In 2014 Wisconsin dropped slightly below the national average in the percentage of eligible kids who are participating in Medicaid or CHIP.

The report talked about the “Welcome Mat” effect and said that a key factor in Wisconsin’s higher Medicaid/CHIP participation rate in past years was a decision made by Governor Tommy Thompson in 1997. At a time when legislators were pushing to increase eligibility for children, using the new CHIP funding approved that year by Congress, Thompson argued that welfare reform would be more effective and participation of eligible kids would be higher if the state approved a new program, called BadgerCare, covering parents and children up to 185 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL).

Thompson argued that parents who get BadgerCare coverage would be more likely to enroll their children. That was a new theory at the time, but has subsequently been well documented in Wisconsin and other states.

“In Wisconsin, on the other hand, the Medicaid/CHIP participation rate for children decreased – notwithstanding the many aspects of the ACA that increased participation in other states. The most likely explanation for that is that Wisconsin decreased eligibility for parents,” the report said. “As almost all the other states were increasing or maintaining the Medicaid income limits for parents, Wisconsin cut the BadgerCare income limit for parents in half in 2014, and roughly 60,000 parents lost their BadgerCare coverage. It appears that some of those parents did not renew the BadgerCare coverage for their children, which was essentially the reverse of the welcome mat effect that occurred in many other states.
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The report says that Wisconsin could regain its leadership in that important area by tapping into tools that many other states utilize to make enrollment and renewal processes more efficient and less burdensome for families.

“Another way to increase the percentage of BadgerCare-eligible children who are enrolled is to expand eligibility for adults – thereby undoing part of the cut in parent eligibility made in 2014,” the report states. “The effectiveness of covering parents as a strategy for improving kids’ participation was demonstrated almost twenty years ago when Governor Thompson and the legislature created BadgerCare. By heeding that lesson, state lawmakers could significantly improve access to affordable health care for children.”