Congress established the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) in 1997, in response to mounting pressure to address the number of uninsured children in the United States. Proponents of the plan argued that CHIP would deliver health insurance coverage to half of the nation’s 10 million uninsured children by 2000. Through federal FY 2005, however, the CHIP program had never reached enrollment of even 4 million children at any given time.