Statewide Challenge Aims To Insure Children Without Health Care

Dozens of health insurance enrollment groups in Massachusetts are promising to bump up efforts to find and insure children without health coverage.

A statewide challenge kicking off Tuesday is aimed at enrolling at least 500 additional children in health care plans this month.

Amy Whitcomb Slemmer, head of the nonprofit group Health Care For All, said there are still thousands of children in Massachusetts without coverage, perhaps due to financial reasons or confusing paperwork.

"At the end of this challenge in June, we will get back together and identify some of the lessons learned and some of the barriers we were able to overcome in order to sign these children up," she said.

An estimated 98 percent of children in Massachusetts do have health coverage.