Evidence for a Uniform Medicaid Eligibility Threshold for Children and Parents.

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* Abbreviations: CHIP — : Children’s Health Insurance Program SCHIP — : State Children’s Health Insurance Program If you ask children’s clinicians to identify the key influencers who help children grow up healthy and resilient, most will place parents at the top of the list. Parents are the navigators and shapers of children’s developmentally pivotal experiences, serve as critically important facilitators of timely preventive health care, and provide vital protection and support when children face acute and chronic illnesses.1 However, the majority of federal and state programs that provide health coverage to children and parenting adults treat them as if their needs are somehow disconnected. Children and parents typically qualify for government programs, such as Medicaid, on the basis of distinct household income eligibility thresholds, thereby covering tens of millions of children while leaving many parents in the same households without such coverage. This gap in public program coverage across generations leaves a shortfall for parents nationally: As recently as 2016, 89.6% of children had insurance coverage for the last 12 months, whereas only 80.5% of their parents had the same pattern.2 On the basis of my conservative estimate of the number of parents residing with their minor children in 2016 from the US Census … Address correspondence to Matthew M. Davis, MD, MAPP, Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, 225 E Chicago Ave, Mailstop 162, Chicago, IL 60611. E-mail: mmdavis{at}luriechildrens.org