SCHIP Dental Performance Over the First 10 Years

The State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) was enacted by Congress in 1997 to provide publicly funded health insurance to children from modest-income families commonly called the “working poor.” Congress offered states the option of expanding Medicaid to cover these children, starting novel programs that could be designed very differently from Medicaid, or combining these two approaches. After 10 years of experience with SCHIP, the American Dental Association conducted this evaluation of dental programs funded by SCHIP in order to determine:

• which states elected to start novel SCHIP programs rather than expand Medicaid and which included a dental benefit in their novel SCHIP programs;
• how comprehensive the dental benefits are in the novel SCHIP programs;
• the adequacy of dental provider networks in the novel SCHIP programs;
• how many states capped dental benefits in the novel SCHIP programs;
• what has been learned from the experience of novel SCHIP programs;
• and how effective novel SCHIP programs have been in providing for dental services.