Hilltop Presents Luncheon Keynote at State Coverage Initiatives Annual Meeting

Hilltop Executive Director Charles Milligan, JD, MPH, was the luncheon keynote speaker at the AcademyHealth State Coverage Initiatives Annual Meeting on July 30, 2009 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In his speech on health reform, Milligan outlined the current efforts to pass federal health reform and its potential impact on states and analyzed the federal-state relationship in the context of comprehensive reform. In addition, Milligan participated on a panel entitled Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program: The Case for Increased Outreach and Enrollment Efforts, which highlighted the enhanced importance of state efforts to enroll eligible populations in public coverage programs. The session focused on ways to increase enrollment, and the increased incentives for doing so under Children’s Health Insurance Program Authorization Act (CHIPRA), through examples such as express lane eligibility, facilitated enrollment, intensive application assistance, automated eligibility, etc. The session also examined Maryland’s lessons learned in creating a system to identify and enroll uninsured children via income tax forms. Milligan’s presentation, entitled Maryland’s Kids First Act: Using Tax Forms to Identify Medicaid/SCHIP-Eligible Children, described the Kids First Act, Maryland’s implementation activities, and discussed the initial results of Hilltop’s study of the effectiveness of the state’s outreach efforts. The study was commissioned by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s State Health Access Reform Evaluation (SHARE) program. To view the presentation, click here.

July 1, 2009