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Outreach Program is Educating Parents about Health Insurance

With the recent start of a new school year, the Right from the Start Medicaid Outreach Project (RSM) is making sure health coverage is a top priority for Georgia's kids. The RSM Project hosts a Back to School Campaign each year to target students who might not otherwise receive medical coverage.

Rita Ladson (center) signs up her two grandsons, Kelvin, 5, and Joshua, 3, for health insurance.

The project is made up of nearly 20 teams of 180 outreach workers strategically stationed across the state. Their job is to conduct community outreach events to process Medicaid applications for children. Many RSM staffers are members of Family Connection county collaboratives.

"We partner with local businesses and the Board of Education, and this year we have added the Department of Revenue to our list of collaboratives," says Jon Anderson, project director. "This year, the RSM Project celebrated the recent sales tax holiday by partnering with local and national retailers that sell school supplies. Outreach workers set up display tables at more than 80 locations and handed out literature to shoppers who were eager to find bargains. The best bargain of the day was no-cost health insurance."

At a Kmart store in LaGrange, RSM worker Angie Jones recently assisted a grandmother who was shopping with her two grandsons. Rita Ladson is the legal guardian of her grandsons and said she had heard of RSM. She said she was hesitant to stop at the display table because she thought she and her husband's income would make her ineligible to get medical coverage for the children. Jones said she explained the RSM application process, income guidelines, and criteria that would make Ladson eligible for the program. She said the grandmother was pleased to discover that she did qualify.

RSM outreach workers also identify potential, eligible "customers" through school lunch programs. Many students who are eligible for reduced or free school lunch also are eligible for either Medicaid or Georgia's SCHIP program, PeachCare for Kids. The information parents are required to provide on the free and reduced lunch application is closely aligned with eligibility requirements for Medicaid and PeachCare for Kids.

The National School Lunch Act was amended two years ago to authorize limited access and disclosure of the information provided by parents on these applications. (Parents can check a box to authorize release of the information.)

According to RSM's data from the Children's Health and Policy Initiatives department at the Georgia Health Policy Center, 43 percent of Georgia's students were eligible for reduced or free lunch in 1998. In the most recent study done in 2000 of health insurance status for children 18 and under, more than 104,000 kids were Medicaid-eligible but uninsured, and more than 37,000 children were SCHIP-eligible but not insured.