Every Child..An Encouraging Success
In the summer of 2005, a year after severe legislative cutbacks to the Oregon Health Plan and Medicaid, the future of healthcare for children from low income families in Oregon looked bleak! About 20% of the parents of children whose health care was being provided at Community Health Center were dropped from the plan. Most of these parents also withdrew their children, many not realizing their children were still eligible for OHP. At CHC, this both significantly increased our population of uninsured children and seriously decreased the resources with which we were attempting to meet their needs.
In July 2005, it was estimated that over 3000 children from low income families in Jackson County had no access to primary health care because they had no insurance! In that same month, a nation-wide study by the American Academy of Pediatrics confirmed that the presence (or absence) of health insurance ( either private or public) was the main determinant of children’s health. No other factor came close! Over 1/3 of these uninsured children (in the USA) had suffered a significant health consequence!
Responding to this grim picture, Community Health Center took a deep breath ... and became even more proactive! Our entire staff enthusiastically adopted a plan to TRY to provide a medical home for every low income, uninsured child in Jackson County! Our entire community soon joined us, with marvelous “partnership” support from all three of our county’s hospitals, the Jackson County Medical Society’s Volpact program, numerous civic and faith groups, as well as from a large number of private foundations.
Over the next 3 months, we hired and trained a wonderful group of bilingual community health outreach workers (affectionately called “CHOWS”) to help identify these children, educate their parents and facilitate their entry (or reentry) into BOTH a medical home at CHC and insurance coverage by OHP. We printed and distributed over 18,000 “bookmarks” (in both English and Spanish), detailing the advantages of a medical home at CHC and offering to help these parents obtain insurance for their children.
Preliminary results from the first 7 months of the program are now complete ... and quite encouraging:
1) Within a month after the CHOWS began (in October, 2005), the number of
children applying for OHP at CHC had doubled ... and has been sustained since!
2) The percentage of CHC patients who applied for OHP and were denied ( mostly
adults, mostly due to technicalities) dropped by half ... and very few children were denied coverage by OHP when a CHOW helped facilitate the application process. As always at CHC, NO child was denied care!
3) Over the first 7 months of “Every Child,” CHC added or renewed an average of over 160 children per month (1150 total!), each of whom is now both enrolled in a medical home at CHC and covered by OHP!
If this brisk start is maintained (accounting for the usual summer falloff in demand for children’s health care), we will come close to meeting our original goal of enrolling 2/3 of these 3000 “at risk” children in our first “Every Child” year!
Overall, these early results are VERY encouraging! The final figures will be available early in 2007. Needless to say, we at CHC are most grateful to ALL of YOU in this marvelous community who are helping make good medical care a reality for “Every Child” who lives in Jackson County!!!
THANK YOU ALL!
Respectfully submitted,
John W. Forsyth, M.D.
Past President, Board of Directors
September, 2006
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