Texas has the worst rate of uninsured children (11.2 percent of Texas kids uninsured in 2018) in the country–more than twice the national rate of 5.5%! After a decade of improving health coverage Texas kids have had two years. Additionally, there has been a steady decline of children enrolled in the Texas Medicaid program and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) since 2017.
Key contributing factors:
- In recent years the state of Texas has done very little outreach to market the availability of these programs.
- Anti-immigrant rhetoric has caused immigrants and mixed-status families (i.e. families that include both U.S. citizens and non-citizens) to drop their coverage and the coverage of their children out of fear that participation will lead to deportation or cause difficulty with changing their immigration status.
- Additionally, Texas has adopted particularly unforgiving policies for children enrolled in Medicaid that result in thousands of children being disenrolled due to red tape.