Two PhD students became so frustrated in their efforts to enroll their baby in Pennsylvania’s Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) that they documented their ordeal in an article in “Health Affairs” — a leading journal of the academic health policy research world but not a publication read by the broad low-income public whose plight their actions spotlighted. I went to interview the two to get the story behind the story of how they battled the state bureacracy and ultimately got the governor’s office involved. Their personal refrain really captured something about the Medicaid/CHIP tangle in Pennsylvania: “It really shouldn’t take two people with graduate degrees to get through this CHIP gauntlet,” the couple said said, pointing out that their situation was a window into how large numbers of low-income parents and their children were being treated by the state.
