G-2106-17063

Hoosier Action Resource Center (Hoosier Action) is a membership-led, community organization based in rural Southern Indiana empowering individuals to advocate for themselves around issues in health, opportunity and progress.

Indiana has a unique Medicaid plan. The state requires that Healthy Indiana Plan (HIP) recipients pay into monthly premiums called POWER accounts. Prior to COVID-19, if participants failed to pay these premiums, they may be “kicked down” from HIP Plus, which includes a dental benefit, to HIP Basic, which does not - or kicked out of the Medicaid program entirely. Hoosier Action shares that this punitive process disproportionately affected low income and African American Hoosiers.

In July 2021, Indiana expanded its Medicaid program to include all Medicaid recipients as eligible for HIP Plus, ensuring that 1 in 5 Indiana residents have access to a Medicaid dental benefit. The state also suspended forced disenrollment.

Hoosier Action is seeking funding from CareQuest Institute to build a grassroots movement in Indiana to ensure that these positive changes remain permanent, and Indiana residents will maintain their dental benefits. Hoosier Action will build this movement through a three-part action plan. First, Hoosier Action will organize in community through peer-to-peer outreach, phone-banking, door to door canvassing, one-on-one relationship building and leadership development for grassroots advocates. Hoosier Action has an impressive leadership development curriculum which includes important topics like power-mapping, campaign development, effective communication, etc.

Next, Hoosier Action will develop a communications campaign centered around the narrative that oral health is critical to overall public health. Activities will include earned media outreach, social media content development, consumer story sharing, and petitions to state and local government. Hoosier Action will strategically use race-class messaging throughout these communication activities, specifically naming racist “divide and conquer” tactics to bring people together in support of a shared goal.

Lastly, Hoosier Action will perform a landscape scan in order to better understand power dynamics within the Indiana oral healthcare system. Staff will produce and publish findings learned through meetings with 40 policy makers, health care officials and providers. The organization will also map Medicaid oral healthcare providers in the state of Indiana to reveal access gaps.

This project builds on Hoosier Action’s prior Medicaid advocacy work, and for that reason, they will start the project with an existing base of 5,000 health advocates. They aim to double the number of health advocates in their network as part of this project and will specifically seek to engage low-income Hoosiers, rural Hoosiers, and people of color.

Most of the budget for this proposal is allocated for staff time. The remainder of the budget line items are associated with canvassing materials and campaign-related advertising. This request represents roughly 20% of the organization’s overall budget.