The New Child Health Insurance Expansions: How Will School-Based Health Centers Fit In?

In June 1998, the Making the Grade National Program Office and the National Assembly on School‐Based Health Care sponsored a workshop on the relationship between the State Child Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) and school‐based health centers. Workshop participants used the health centers' experience with Medicaid managed care as a window for understanding their prospects for negotiating contracts with health plans under SCHIP. Speakers representing the federal perspective, state agencies, health plans, and local school‐based health centers offered their views on the challenges of developing contracts, incentives, and disincentives that health plans have to contract with school‐based health centers, and what has accounted for success where relationships are moving forward. Experiences in Colorado and Connecticut were presented as case studies on these evolving issues.