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Welcome New Hampshire has been proactive in adopting best practices for outreach, simplification and coordination of children’s health insurance programs. These actions, combined with a prosperous economy, resulted in declines in the uninsured rate among low-income children. With a 5.1% uninsured rate among children, down from 9.9% in 1997, New Hampshire moved into fourth place among states with the lowest percentage of uninsured. But this success is at risk. During the past year the stagnating economy has accelerated the need for access to affordable health coverage. New Hampshire Healthy Kids Corporation and the Department of Health & Human Services have been challenged to find ways to serve more families within the constraints of the State budget. We must work harder to preserve the gains we have made in covering kids. A newly formed New Hampshire Coalition will participate in a national Covering Kids & Families (CKF) initiative with generous funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The CKF initiative is designed to engage each state in working through statewide and local coalitions to increase the number of eligible children enrolled in publicly supported health coverage programs. In New Hampshire, our focus will be on hard-to-reach families in the minority and rural populations. A primary activity at the statewide level will be to evaluate opportunities to improve the enrollment and retention of eligible children through public policy. We will work with community agencies to enhance their ability to help families apply for and retain coverage. Through a telecounseling project, we will intervene with families at risk for slipping through the cracks at various stages of the application, enrollment and renewal processes. New Hampshire has two local project sites where a variety of specific strategies will be tested for effectiveness. Rural communities in Strafford County will be targeted by the HUB Family Resource Center of Dover. Child Health Services, Manchester Community Health Center and the Minority Health Coalition will be working with the minority population in the greater Manchester community. Over the next four years, through the statewide coalition and the local projects, we will work hard to identify successful models for outreach, simplification and coordination to enroll and retain children in state health coverage programs. This website will be your source for information about the lessons learned at the local level and the broader scope of statewide activities. Come back often, as our content will be updated frequently. Through the work in this grant and the support of state and community partners, our goal is to reduce the state uninsured rate for children from 5% to 3% in the next four years. We look forward to the work ahead. Sincerely, Sol Rockenmacher, M.D. Chairman, NH CKF Statewide Coalition
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