Children's Health Insurance Program

This site provides you with an overview of CHIP, as well as project ideas and resources you can use to organize a CHIP project at your chapter. Click on the slide in the right column to download a slide presentation (PDF, 1.3MB) on CHIP. For more information, you can contact the AMA Department of Medical Student Services or the Children's Defense Fund, one of the foremost organizations working on CHIP outreach and enrollment efforts nationally. (This link will take you off the AMA Web site.)

What is CHIP?
The AMA-MSS selected Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) education, outreach, and enrollment as its National Service Project for 2000-2002. CHIP is the largest investment in children's health coverage since the creation of Medicaid in 1965. The program, established in 1997, provides $48 billion in grants to states over 10 years to provide free or low-cost health insurance for uninsured children age 18 and younger. Although benefits vary from state to state, once children are insured, they generally will be able to receive regular check-ups, hospital care, immunizations, eyeglasses, and prescription drug coverage. At this point, almost every state is registering children in the CHIP program.

The Problem
Even though CHIP was signed into law in 1997, there are approximately 2-3 million uninsured children that are eligible for CHIP and an additional 3-4 million children eligible for Medicaid but are not enrolled. CHIP cannot be successfully implemented without the involvement of state-wide and community-based organizations to inform families about CHIP and Medicaid and facilitate their access to easy-to-understand information, as well as provide them with help with the enrollment process. CHIP and Medicaid have many barriers to enrollment, including a lack of awareness by families of the program, assumptions that employment automatically disqualifies them from subsidized programs, the complex enrollment process, and cultural barriers. It is essential to complement policy and programs with grassroots organizing to reach one child at a time.

Medical Students Can Make A Difference
Medical students are uniquely positioned to reach out and serve the needs of the target population. Medical students can interject a strong component of enthusiasm, energy, idealism, and motivation to support already existing state and community-wide outreach and enrollment campaigns. Since medical students have a connection with eligible families through a wide variety of health care and community environments, they have a unique ability to find target families. Involvement can range from working with existing outreach efforts a few time a year to becoming a key player in enrolling children in CHIP and Medicaid. This project is tailored to the needs of busy medical students with a wide range of committment levels.

Taking Care of Kids
The MSS's initiative, Taking Care of Kids, is a campaign to sign up our nations uninsured children under the State CHIP. The MSS project is aligned with the AMA's larger mission to expand access to health care for all of our nation's uninsured individuals. The MSS represents 48,000 medical students who decided to collectively focus their energies on behalf of the CHIP outreach and enrollment efforts around the country. The objective of the MSS program is for medical students to provide parents with accurate and reliable information about children's health insurance and, more importantly, to link those parents with enrollment sites or opportunities.

The MSS has been successful with CHIP outreach and enrollment at the national level, organizing National Service Projects at the Annual and Interim Meetings. Members of the AMA-MSS are taking this campaign throughout the nation, implementing outreach and enrollment programs in their local schools, community centers, hospitals, free clinics, and other local venues. The diversity of project ideas below reflects, not only the state and regional differences of the program, but the imagination and enthusiasm of the students organizing the projects!

The MSS was rewarded for all their efforts with CHIP. They were awarded the 2002 Associations Advance America Award of Excellence from the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) for their work with CHIP. The Award recognizes associations and industry partners that advance society with innovative programs in education, skills training, standard setting, business and social innovation, knowledge creation, citizenship, and community service. The MSS CHIP outreach project was one of sixteen associations selected from over 100 entries.

Project Ideas