The Mercury News
March 9, 2001

Insurance plan for children off to fast start
By Michelle Guido

Santa Clara County's first-in-the-nation plan to provide health coverage to the 71,000 children who lack insurance is off to an even stronger start than officials had hoped.

Since the beginning of the year, more than 5,000 have been signed up for one of the three insurance plans available under the Children's Health Initiative, community leaders are to announce today. That far exceeds the goals leaders set for the first six months of the outreach effort and has prompted other California counties -- including San Francisco and San Diego -- to copy the program.

"I expected no more than at most 500 sign-ups a month, " said Leona Butler, CEO of the Santa Clara Family Health Plan, an independent HMO created by the county. Instead, that number has been closer to 500 registrations a week.

The county's Valley Community Outreach has been signing up children who already use county or community clinics but are uninsured. Since Jan 2., outreach workers in the county and community clincis have signed up 1,521 children for Med-Cal and 1,712 for Healthy Families, both state-funded programs. At the same time, it has enrolled 1,776 in the county's newly formed Healthy Kids program, which will server the working poor and undocumented immigrants.

The official enrollment push begins with a kickoff event on Sunday of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in San Jose. The largest part of the future registration effort will be conducted through churches, community groups and ultimately, schools.

"To discover that the demand for this is so much larger than what we thought is just confirmation that we were right -- and that we're going to be able to touch the lives of so many people,"
said Amy Dean, president fo the South Bay Labor Council and founding director of Working Partnerships, a labor-affiliated policy organization.

Her group, along with faith-based People Acting in Community Together, has worked since last spring to make health insurance for all the county's children a reality.

Under the $14 million a year initiative, children up to age 18 can be covered by one of the three health insurance plans for a full range of services including check-ups, immunizations, dental and vision care, mental health care, prescription drugs and hospital stays. Small premiums and co-payments are involved, but they are based on a sliding scale waived for any family who can't afford to pay.

Medi-Cal covers families who live under, at or near the poverty line. Under the Healthy Families program, a family can make up to 250 percent of the federal poverty level, or about $43,000 a year for a family of four.

Healthy Kids was created to reach out to those children whose families fall through the cracks: uninsured children in the county who are either undocumented immigrants -- who don't qualify for the state programs -- or children whose families make up to three times the federal poverty level, or about $52,000 a year for a family of four.

"The reason we've been so successful with Healthy Kids is because it really fills that gap that has existed all along and that has prevented the working poor from affording health insurance for their children," Butler said.