Communications Strategies for Medicaid and SCHIP Retention

While enrolling uninsured children and parents in health care coverage programs is often the focus of coalitions' efforts, retention is crucial for the long-term health of enrollees. This toolkit includes ideas for communicating about retention, opportunities in outreach, and communications ideas to help enrollees and eligibility workers.

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Table of Contents

Retention: The Environment
Factors that affect Medicaid and SCHIP retention, ways to improve the renewal process and coalition strategies designed to increase and promote retention.

Retention: The Scope of the Challenge
Many states focus on enrollment instead of retention, and Medicaid and SCHIP are increasingly under fire by the federal and state governments.

Retention: Why Eligible Children Lose Coverage
Children lose coverage for a variety of reasons, including financial, procedural and lifestyle issues. To help raise retention numbers, it is important to understand why children lose coverage.

Retention: Ideas for Improvement
From simplifying the renewal process to engaging in more tailored outreach efforts, ideas for emphasizing retention as an important step in health care coverage enrollment efforts.

Retention: Communications Strategies
Ideas for communications and media outreach, as well as a description of the current landscape of the retention process.

Retention: Gaps in Knowledge
Use these examples as ways to think about how to better improve your message and outreach efforts.