An expansion in Pennsylvania’s Children’s Health Insurance Program helped add more than 15,000 children to the program in a year, according to the state Department of Insurance.

The program, one of the country’s oldest and most successful, grew by nearly 3,000 from February to April, leaving about 4 percent of children in the state without health insurance, one of the lowest percentages in the country, said George Hoover, the state’s deputy insurance commissioner. Texas has the highest percentage, according to the U.S. Census, with more than 21 percent of children uninsured.

Health insurance is an issue in this year’s Democratic primary. Sen. Hillary Clinton cited the CHIP program often during her successful presidential primary campaign here last month and claimed credit for pushing through the federal CHIP legislation in 1997, three years after Pennsylvania’s program began under the late Gov. Bob Casey.

“We like to say the federal (CHIP) legislation was modeled after the Pennsylvania CHIP legislation,” said David Callahan, executive vice president of the Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children, a nonprofit advocacy organization.
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