Organizations unite to address the uninsured

Medical professionals from around the state gathered for a May 2 conference at Huston Tillotson University to unite behind one goal: band together to cover the uninsured today and ensure a better tomorrow.

The Austin conference is part of Cover the Uninsured week, a national awareness campaign spearheaded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. During the week, volunteers organize events to draw attention to the nearly 46 million people without health coverage and propose solutions to reduce the increasing number of uninsured.

“The solutions are two-fold,” said Diana Resnik, senior vice president for community care in the Seton family of hospitals. “We have to be a collective voice in the central Texas area to tell the story to the Legislature and anyone who will listen about the importance of health insurance. We have to come together with smart solutions and smart ways so that we can change this growing problem.”

Some of the focus of the event fell on finding health coverage for the eight million uninsured children nationwide, more than one million of whom are Texas residents.

“More than 700,000 uninsured children in Texas, or half of the uninsured children in our state, could be insured today under our current Medicaid and Chip rules if we just did a better job of outreach and enrollment and keeping those kids attached to the program,” Resnik said.

Boosting enrollment presents one major hurdle to ensuring that all people have access to health care. Several organizations work to raise awareness of public and private coverage programs and match eligible patients to them, but come against the problem of sorting through multitudes of options. After all, Travis and Williamson counties alone have between 60 and 70 of these programs, according to John Wise, president of Network Sciences, a company that develops Web-based software. Because of this, the company has teamed up with the Indigent Care Collaboration to tailor a software program to assist in determining eligibility for Medicaid, SSI, SCHIP, and other federal and state programs for low-income individuals such as Title V, Title XX and the Medical Assistance Program funding.

“It’s a simple three-minute Web-based screening tool called Medicaider developed by Network Sciences that our ICC members – clinics, hospitals, emergency rooms – are using to screen people and connect them to a source of insurance,” said Ann Kitchen, executive director of ICC.

It works like this: an uninsured person walks into a health care facility, a provider inputs information into the Medicaider system and determines the person’s eligibility for a health insurance program in minutes. When ICC started the project, member health organizations screened 110,000 people and found more than 96,000 eligible persons. The reward of the program helps uninsured people find coverage and stretches health care dollars to benefit a higher number of patients, according to Kitchen.

“Cutting edge technology plus cutting edge regional collaboration equals $6 million in additional health care dollars invested back in our community,” she said.

Fred Butler, executive director of the Community Action Network, also tied health coverage for children to economic aspects of society.

“We know that if children are insured, they are in better health, and if they are in better health, they are more capable of learning, if they are more capable of learning, they are more capable of graduating from high school, and if they’re more capable of graduating, then their earning power and ability to give back to the community is significantly greater,” Butler said.

All participants at the conference agreed that universal access to care benefits everyone. Providing insurance to all people will reduce the strain on physicians and health care organizations that provide millions of dollars each year in charity care, reduce the strain on the future economy and support lower mortality rates, healthier populations and fewer lost days of work and school.

Additional resources:

For more information on Medicaider and how to start using it in your practice, contact Ann Kitchen at the Indigent Care Collaboration. Call (512) 804-2090 ext. 201 or e-mail akitchen@icc-centex.org. Additional information is available on the ICC Web site.

See the latest events, news coverage and outcomes on the Cover the Uninsured Week official Web site.