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Report: Wisconsin Losing Ground To Other States In Helping Insure Children

Other States Enrolling Families For Medicaid Faster

UW Health (CC-BY-NC-ND)

States across the country are making strides in getting children onto health insurance rolls, but Wisconsin’s rate of uninsured children is stagnant.

According to a report the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families released Tuesday, about 4.4 percent, or 58,000, of the state’s children were uninsured in 2014. That’s lower than the national average of 6.0 percent, but other states have been improving at a much faster rate. Wisconsin dropped from ranking sixth best in the percentage of children with health insurance in 2008 to 16th in 2014.

Minnesota, Iowa, Ohio, Illinois and Michigan all have higher youth enrollment rates, states where the council’s Jon Peacock said they’ve done a better job getting children enrolled in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP.

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“The problem here is not so much that we aren’t doing a good job of providing kids potential access to BadgerCare but we’re missing a lot of those kids who are eligible for BadgerCare,” he said.

One reason, Peacock said, is that children are more likely to be insured if the parents are too.

Gov. Scott Walker changed BadgerCare in 2014, giving more extremely poor adults insurance, but making those adults making slightly more ineligible.

Wisconsin is one of more than a dozen Republican-led states that did not expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. Republican officials said they couldn’t be sure the federal government would continue offering financial incentives to expand Medicaid.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated with original reporting.