OLYMPIA – The state has resurrected a health insurance program for children of poor immigrants three years after it was cut, but officials believe there is room for only 4,000 kids.
The state began taking applications on Thursday and will continue accepting them through Dec. 16.
“We’ll do a random pull and simply select the first applicants that will get us up to 4,000,” said Mary Wood, the office chief for eligibility in the state’s Health and Recovery Services division.
Children younger than 18 without U.S. citizenship who live in poverty-level families will be eligible for doctor visits, eye exams and dental care at no charge. That has not been the case for three years.
Enrollment will be expanded in 2007, Wood said, but the number of new slots will depend on how much those enrolled this year cost the state.
“The second year really is going to be determined by the first,” Wood said.
Unless they are permanent aliens and have been in the country for five years, immigrants do not qualify for Medicaid, the state and federal health program for the poor. The Children’s Health Program, which is paid for entirely by state tax money, provides coverage similar to Medicaid.
The program was cut by the Legislature during a budget crunch in 2002. Since then, advocates say, the children once covered through the Children’s Health Program have drifted away from state health programs.
There were about 22,000 children – most of them Spanish speakers – in the program when it closed. About two-thirds of the children moved onto the Basic Health Plan, a state-run insurance program, Wood said. Of those, only 3,800 remain, many supported by community clinics that pay for the insurance premiums, she said.
“Some are likely getting care at community clinics; some are likely getting no health care,” said Jon Gould, deputy director of the Children’s Alliance, a Seattle-based advocacy group. “We do know that kids without insurance get inconsistent and delayed health care.”
Earlier this year, the Legislature budgeted $13.7 million over two years to reopen the program.
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