Human Services News

The Urban Institute:

This report, the third in a series of five annual reports from the Evaluation of the San Mateo County Children's Health Initiative (CHI), provides an overview of the Initiative as well as a detailed look at particular aspects of the program and access to specific services.

During 2005 the initiative took on several new challenges, such as an increased focus on improving retention in public programs, increasing use of preventive care, and improving access to dental and mental health care.

This annual report provides some new data on several of these and other issues that are important to the continued development of the initiative.

Using several data sources, the evaluation investigated issues that are of special interest to the CHI.

These include: the demographic and health status characteristics of Healthy Kids served by the CHI; how demographic characteristics and service use have changed over time; characteristics of high cost users of services and how they differ from other children; access to dental services; access to mental health services; the role of schools in outreach and enrollment; and the factors influencing employer decisions to offer insurance for dependents.

The growth in the Healthy Kids program continued at a slow pace in 2005, particularly for the youngest children (ages 0-5), despite special efforts to enroll more children in this age group.

Based on a limited sample of employer interviews (and complementing similar findings from the evaluation's client survey and focus groups with parents), there is no evidence that employers of low wage workers have altered policies relating to offering insurance coverage to dependents because of the availability of public coverage for low income children in San Mateo County.