Effortless Enrollment: Using Existing Information to Automatically Enroll Eligible Families in Medicaid and CHIP

Many states are exploring ways to work beyond traditional enrollment strategies in order to reach the children who are eligible for Medicaid and CHIP, but not enrolled. In this paper, Robert Nelb, a 2009 MPH candidate at Yale University and Senior Fellow at The Roosevelt Institution, proposes that electronically identifying and automatically enrolling eligible beneficiaries is a promising new strategy that can help reach nearly 10 million uninsured Americans who are eligible for public health programs but are not enrolled.

This author of this paper is the winner of The Hamilton Project’s 2008 Economic Policy Innovation Prize. Please click here to download the paper from The Brookings Institution's web site.