As part of SLHI’s focus on improving Arizonans access to health coverage, SLHI acts as a convener, and provides financial and staff support for the Cover Arizona coalition. The Coalition is comprised of more than 900 members representing community and faith-based organizations, health care providers, and others working statewide to build awareness and connect individuals and families to affordable health coverage offered through AHCCCS (Medicaid) and the Health Insurance Marketplace.

Since 2014, more than 500,000 Arizonans have gained coverage through Medicaid and the Marketplace. Cover Arizona has helped drive this enrollment growth by providing coalition partners with shared messaging and media outreach assistance. The coalition also created a consumer website that lists local enrollment events, informs consumers about basic health insurance concepts, and allows them to schedule time with an enrollment assister in their local community. Last year, there were more than 60,000 visits to the website leading up to, during and just after Marketplace open enrollment (October – March).

Member organizations employed a variety of strategies in conducting outreach to consumers. For example, Arizona PIRG worked to connect young adults at community college campuses to insurance options. Concurrently, Enroll America conducted data-driven outreach efforts in local communities where the potential to increase health coverage was the most promising.

SLHI helped support many of these efforts financially. In FY2015, we were joined by numerous local and national funding partners in these efforts, including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Arizona Community Foundation, the Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust, the BHHS Legacy Foundation and the Community Foundation for Southern Arizona.

SLHI also financially supported both the Pima Community Access Program (PCAP) and Keogh Health Connection in augmenting their capacity to provide enrollment assistance to consumers. Through the Cover Arizona Coalition (in partnership with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services), we helped train more than 400 individuals who attended two-day trainings in Chandler, Tucson, Yuma and Flagstaff so that enrollment assisters could be better prepared to help consumers gain coverage. Surveys conducted of enrollment assisters in 2014 and 2015 showed tremendous gains in knowledge and preparedness from year one to year two as a result of such efforts.

In 2015, SLHI and other Cover Arizona partners were able to share our successes at the Grantmakers in Health annual conference as well as other national conferences. The coalition’s breadth, our strong relationships with our federal partners, and the high degree of collaboration among our partners has gained national attention, with Arizona touted as a model for states accessing coverage through the Health Insurance Marketplace.