Ensuring that everyone in America has affordable and reliable
health care coverage by 2010.

Click here for more on RWJF's work in this area.

N 2004 THE FOUNDATION ADOPTED an ambitious goal: to help secure affordable and stable health care coverage for all Americans by 2010. Over the next five years, we will build support among opinion leaders for this goal through high-profile communications campaigns, innovative research and policy analysis, and efforts to enroll the millions of uninsured children who are eligible for Medicaid or State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). We believe that ensuring coverage for all children and low-income adults is a first step toward achieving coverage for all. To assist policy-makers in developing and implementing effective policies, we will analyze new proposals to expand coverage and assess the barriers to achieving affordable and stable coverage. Those barriers include escalating health care costs and structural features of health insurance markets.

The Foundation’s new goal combines the strengths of our research and policy analysis projects and our national coverage campaigns. In 2004 the Institute of Medicine released the final report in its landmark RWJF-funded study, “Consequences of Uninsurance,” which called on the nation to secure coverage for all by 2010. With Foundation support, several other prominent research organizations analyzed health coverage trends, the relationships between coverage and use of medical care, the decline in employer-sponsored coverage, and the relationship between health coverage and labor markets. For example, a Center for Studying Health System Change study released in August 2004 found that despite a drop in employer coverage, an increase in the number of Americans covered by public programs prevented an even sharper increase in the number of uninsured Americans.

The largest nonpartisan mobilization to secure affordable health coverage for all Americans, Cover the Uninsured Week 2004, consisted of more than 2,700 public events in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. It attracted the support of national leaders in business, religion and government, including former Presidents Carter and Ford, and leading entertainment industry figures, including ER’s Noah Wyle.

While helping shape and inform the national agenda on the future of health care coverage, we focused on immediate challenges as well. RWJF led the fifth Covering Kids and Families® Back-to-School Campaign, a national effort to inform working parents with modest incomes that their children may be eligible for Medicaid or SCHIP. Through the State Coverage Initiatives program we helped states improve the availability and affordability of private and public coverage for their low-income residents.