The Cover Arizona Coalition was formed when Vitalyst and highly-experienced outreach partners convened a small group to think through the best way to achieve dramatic health coverage improvements during the first year of the Health Insurance Marketplace and Medicaid expansion.
The opportunity was both exciting and daunting. In early 2013, very little information was available about how the process would work and whether new rules and unproven systems would be effective. With so many unknowns, the coalition focused on what – and who – they knew. The coalition thrived and succeeded amidst the turmoil of the first open enrollment because of its collective experience, connectivity and capacity to quickly share and act on information as soon as it became available.
Three years later, the Cover Arizona Coalition includes nearly 1,000 non-partisan organizational members focused on helping each other as each of them help Arizonans find the health coverage they need.
In the first year alone, more than four times the population of Flagstaff had been enrolled into coverage. In that same year, Arizona ranked 48th in terms of federal support dollars, yet ranked 29th in the percentage of total population enrolled. By year three, total enrollment exceeded five times Flagstaff’s population.
The results speak for themselves. Each year’s open enrollment has been more successful in optimizing progressively limited resources to maximum effect. Thanks to the coalition’s continuous growth and adaptation, Arizona’s uninsured rate has dramatically decreased from 17.1 percent in 2013 to 13.6 percent in 2014 and 11.6 percent in 2015.