1. Hawaii's Recent Success 2004 was an exceptional year to help more children and youth enroll in QUEST and Medicaid and retain their benefits. Last January, the "Children and Pregnant Women" application was launched and in June a new passive renewal process for cases with children started. These simplification efforts were complemented by the new Outreach and Assistance Project, funded by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and Med-QUEST, which placed additional outreach workers in various communities to help families with applications and renewals. The net result of these initiatives is over 9,000 more children and youth ages 0-18 years old enrolled and retained in QUEST and Medicaid in 2004! Enrollment data by age categories can be downloaded at http://www.coveringkids.com/news/Section_37.asp. 2. HHS Redistributes $643 Million in Unspent Federal CHIP Funds After a drawn-out debate, the U. S. Department of Health and Human Resources will redistribute $643 million in unspent State Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) funds, helping 28 states avoid funding shortfalls in 2005. The news release is at http://www.hhs.gov/news/press/2005pres/20050119a.html. 3. Two California Reports a. Many Children Remain Uninsured and Not Eligible for Medi-Cal and Healthy Families This policy brief highlights regional variations of rates among California children ages 0-5 and ages 6-17 from limited income families (below 300% FPL) who were uninsured and not eligible for Medi-Cal or Healthy families in 2001. This web-only publication is relevant to policy makers and children health advocates who work on health access and children's issues at the local level. These data are particularly pertinent as public-private partnerships have emerged across California to provide health care coverage for this vulnerable population. Rates of uninsured-and-not eligible children were estimated using the 2001 California Health Interview Survey (CHIS 2001). b. Children's Health Insurance Coverage Increases as Result of Public Program Expansion This fact sheet examines children's health insurance coverage, and children who are uninsured but eligible for coverage through public programs, using data from the 2003 California Health Interview Survey (CHIS 2003). It also describes how the profile has changed since 2001. CHIS 2003 provides the most recent information available on health insurance coverage of Californians, both statewide and at the county level. More than 1.1 million children under age 19 were uninsured for all or part of the year in 2003--a significant drop from the 1.5 million who had no insurance in 2001. Children's coverage through a parent's employment-based insurance dropped 4.3 percentage points from 2001, while children's Medi-Cal or Healthy Families coverage increased 5.2 percentage points. The authors conclude that Medi-Cal and Healthy Families were effective in covering children as employment-based coverage declined for both children and adults between 2001 and 2003. If children's Medi-Cal and Healthy Families enrollment had increased only as much as adult enrollment in these programs, an additional 487,000 children would have been uninsured in 2003. The effectiveness of these public programs in assuring that children are covered for health care expenses, combined with the availability of federal matching funds for Medi-Cal and Healthy Families expenditures, underscores their potential for offsetting at least some of the loss in job-based insurance. 4. Federal Cap on Medicaid Funding Saying that White House plans could undermine, not stabilize Medicaid, Senate Democrats have gone on record to oppose any proposals to "cap" Medicaid funding or eliminate the fundamental guarantee of Medicaid coverage for low-income children, pregnant women, parents, people with disabilities and senior citizens. 5. "An Introduction to the HIPAA Privacy Rule" The Covering Kids & Families National Program Office commissioned Joy Pritts, JD, of the Health Policy Institute at Georgetown University to develop this report. It provides technical assistance on the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and is divided into three parts: Part I: Overview of the HIPAA Privacy Rule Part II: Is a Covering Kids & Families Participant a Covered Health Care Provider Under HIPAA Part III: HIPAA's Potential Impact on Covering Kids & Families Statewide and Local Project Participants