A Kid Gives 10 Reasons Why Kids Need Affordable Health Coverage
Posted June 10th, 2009 by Emma WJoan Alker, Co-Director of the Center for Children and Families at Georgetown University’s Health Policy Institute, has been working on children’s issues for over twenty years. When thinking about why children’s health needs deserve more attention in health reform, she decided to seek out experts on the topic – her daughter and fellow 5th grade classmates in a D.C. public school. Her daughter, Emma, is an experienced blogger and wrote the following entry about her mother’s visit to her classroom.
Last week my mom came to my class (I’m in 5th grade) to discuss the important issue of why children especially should have health care coverage. Everyone contributed ideas to the discussion; and their ideas about the problems caused by not having health care ranged from doing worse in school, spread of sicknesses, quality of life, and costs of hospitals being so high. Below are ten reasons, (not in order of significance) that we came up with: (well, actually we came up with more…but we didn’t want you to drift off.)
1. Kameron: Children like to play games – for example, tag and hide-and-go-seek, which are both touching games. This means transmission of germs.
2. Shaniah: Sometimes, when parents lose their jobs, their kids lose access to medicine, which they need to survive.
3. Max: Children shouldn’t be dying from such simple things like teeth or chickenpox. Children with health care coverage are most likely to grow up and get a fine education, and then the job they’ve always wanted.
4. Alicia: Not having health coverage can affect the child’s education. For instance, let’s say recently the child went to the hospital and the bill was very high. The next day, the child comes home from school and needs $10 for a school field trip. The parents cannot afford to pay for the field trip if they wanted to be able to pay the bill from the hospital.
5. Zahra: All kids should have health care coverage because kids have the weaker immune systems and can have more damage done to their bodies than adults.
6. Bakari: Another big reason that kids need health coverage is that if they cannot get vaccinations, then they die or get a disability.
7. Jonah: Having no health care decreases quality of life because you spend your time in a bed or at a hospital and not able to do the things you want to do.
8. Sam: Having disabilities and dying does not give kids a chance to unleash their full potential, which worsens the quality of their life. This affects future society for the worse.
9. Devin: Parents should not be paying thousands of dollars because their children need medical attention.
10. Karla: Another example why kids should have health care coverage is so kids would get the medicines they need. Without this, kids would get sicker and miss days of school, which causes them not to learn much.
Not being covered affects so many things in a child’s life, and we as a society need to make sure that all kids are able to go to the doctor and receive the coverage they need.
For an in-depth look at policies affecting children’s health coverage, check out The CCF Blog.
7 Comments
June 17, 2009 at 2:03 pm by Ali in Californiaaffordable health coverage is important for kids because regular check-ups, vaccinations, and dental screenings are imperative to childrens’ health and growth, and are quite expensive. having had no insurance myself for many years i cannot tell you how frustrating it can be to have to choose between paying the doctor for my baby’s vaccines, or going to the grocery store for food. we put off his vaccinations for 6 months and ended up with a bill in excess of $500 for 5 vaccines when we were living on $1500/month paying rent of $800 and paying off the credit cards that put my husband through college. totally worth every penny, we just had to live on beans and rice that month. and two more months after–$500 was 2 1/2 months grocery bill for us. we made too much money to qualify for state assistance.
our story is common as dandelions so if you think that doesn’t happen very often you are very lucky to be fooling yourself at the expense of others.
we have great health coverage now, for which we pay $4k/year, the other $4k is picked up by my husband’s company, thankfully. every time one of my kids get sick i’m so grateful that we can afford to take them to the doctor because for so long we had to rely on prayers, home remedies and occasional help from grandparents who are no longer available.
good health coverage didn’t keep my son safe from needing 6 stitches, but it did help pay for the emergency visit to the doctor’s office after hours. it doesn’t prevent cavities, but it did afford my daughter the x-rays and root canals she badly needed when we adopted her. these events are normal kid things which would have thrown my family into serious financial turmoil had we had to pay out of pocket as the cost was in the 1000s of dollars.
checkups for school, appointments for fevers, prescriptions for allergy medicines, vaccinations, fillings, all of these things other people take for granted because they’ve had it all their lives and i hope that my children will be similarly privileged. but make no mistake, it IS the PRIVILEGED among us who get good health and regular medical care.
i find it sickening in the wealthiest, most opportunity-laden country on earth, that we refuse to afford simple doctor visits to the most vulnerable among us, the young, the sick, the elderly, and the working poor.
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Karen Reply:
June 17th, 2009 at 6:37 pm
@Ali in California,
It is true that health insurance coverage does not guarantee good health, but it does help cover expenses for treatment and provide preventive care.
City or county Health Departments are usually a good source for children to receive free immunizations. My son received his shots at the Health Department, supported by our tax dollars, rather than paying the pediatrician or filing insurance.
Also, some doctors are willing to reduce their fees if they know that you or your family are not covered by insurance. Most hospitals have funds for indigent care if there is an emergency.
It is good to check a city’s current resources. Government controlled programs are not always the best answer to a community’s needs.
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Having healthcare insurance for children is definitely VERY important! The kids have made some good points, but the first commenter also points out some important logical flaws in those points. And that’s okay… kids aren’t expected to understand the larger picture. That’s why adults are supposed to focus on what’s best for kids, and explain things to help them learn to see the larger picture. Healthcare insurance means affordable treatment when kids are sick or injured, but it does not prevent sickness and injuries from happening. So yes, quality of life will still be decreased by disability even if you have the healthcare insurance to make your doctor’s visits and treatments more affordable. Being able to go to the doctor and get medicine can speed up recovery time, but healthcare insurance will not give children a childhood free from getting sick and having to stay in instead of going out to play.
There are some really big problems with the proposed healthcare reform that can cause your children much more harm than good in the end. If you click on what I’ve entered as my website, you can read my own account of how being on Medicaid prevented proper diagnosis and treatment of relatively minor problems over a period of years, and how that caused these problems to grow into major health complications, leaving me infertile, more at risk of endometrial cancer in the future, and with a very uncommon neurological disease that has many of the same effects as a brain tumor. I don’t think anyone wants their daughters to go through that. You may think it wouldn’t happen because you wouldn’t end up with Medicaid for your kids… just more affordable healthcare. But the proposed legislation actually makes it likely that healthcare will be more unaffordable. By requiring companies to cover employees (and employees’ kids until they are 26 years old), companies will cut costs somewhere else, like laying-off more employees. And when the government mandates that insurance companies cannot deny someone with a pre-existing condition, the insurance rates will go up because the insurance companies consider these pre-existing conditions high risks.
In fact, this is why the proposed reform includes opening the Medicaid and Medicare system up to accomodate millions more Americans than it does now. And the system is already over-burdened.
When you ask for healthcare reform for your children, you are asking the government to restructure things so that more people lose their jobs, and more children end up getting healthcare coverage through a system that will prevent doctors from doing all they can to help simply because it’s too expensive, and delay your children getting treatment they need because other people were in line first and the system does not push you to the front if your need is greater. And the system is built to keep you in poverty. You will make too much money to qualify for assistance before you make enough money to provide for your kids without it. That’s already happening to the people in the system, and the proposed reform proposes nothing to change it, other than opening it up for 20 million more people.
If I hadn’t been a Medicaid patient, I might have children today. If I did, the proposed reform would terrify me if my children were going to need to depend on it.
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June 11, 2009 at 5:37 am by AnnI hate to burst the bubble but folks, these reasons are as bad when they come from the kids as when adults use them. The medicalization of life is making its way downward, upward, sideways and has become inescapable.
None of these make sense but take #7: “Having no health care decreases quality of life because you spend your time in a bed or at a hospital and not able to do the things you want to do.” Can’t we teach logic? it is being ILL that decreases quality of life. There is no guarantee that having health care means you won’t be in a bed. And if you are in a hospital, obviously you are getting health care.
Or: having a disability and dying affects quality of life. Yes, if you are dead, you have no life. And if you have a disability, your quality of life may be impacted whether or not you have health care.
Goodness gracious – adults lack of logic is being transmitted to the kids. Of course we need help for catostrophic care. But for sore throats? Bruises? and because the world is full of germs?
We need common sense. Health insurance is no guarantee of a good life. We need to go where the problem is: pharmaceutical companies training doctors and the constant fear mongering about health issues. Check out the link between increase in autism and doctors telling patients to stay out of the sun. The role of Vit D in the developing brain is only now being understood. The cost of caring for autistic kids is huge. Had we questioned the word from on high to stay our of the sun we may not have the epidemic of autism. Now, we want to medicalize because kids play tag? Oh, – do think about what you ask for, you may get it.
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June 11, 2009 at 1:03 am by AnitaEmma, huge thanks to you and your mom for leading this discussion. We absolutely need the voices of kids speaking up for themselves. Please invite your friends to come to this post and write their thoughts on why health care coverage is important to them. We really want to hear from them!
Thanks again!
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June 10, 2009 at 1:54 pm by CathyWhy can kids get this so easily, yet so many policymakers just don’t seem to get the link between affordable healthcare coverage and healthy children growing into successful adults? Children’s needs must be addressed in health reform. There are no do-overs for childhood.
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Emma W Reply:
June 10th, 2009 at 7:43 pm
@Cathy, I think kids understand this better because they aren’t as narrow minded and stubborn as some adults, and they’re able to see the big picture. Also sometimes adults make it too complicated.
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