I’m resigned to the fact that we, the United States of America, will never be Canada. We will never learn aboot hockey, eat fiddlehead soup, or (perhaps most importantly) have a national health care system where every citizen can receive quality, free care. Instead, we have a TV culture inspiring obesity and poor dietary choices and a shocking 8,000,000 children who don’t have access to primary care. But we can’t just blame the government.
CHIP, or the Children’s Health Insurance Program, was created in 1997 and is now helping more than 7,500,000 children of low and middle-income families annually to receive quality health care. A poor kid (her parents’ income is at or below the federal poverty line, which is too low anyway) gets free or very low cost care through Medicaid, and a not-quite-as-poor kid (her parents’ income is at or below generally 300 percent of the FPL, which is still not a lot) can affordably get primary care, immunizations, dental, inpatient and outpatient hospital care, and laboratory and x-ray services through state programs. All you have to do is sign up.
Sounds ok, right? It’s not, because there are still more than 5,000,000 uninsured, impoverished kids who qualify for these programs. But a caregiver has to enroll them. And with all the meaty language and prying questions about finances, I get why parents are reluctant to apply. What if the programs aren’t quite as simple as they seem? What if access to care means taking precious hours off of work to attend doctor appointments? What if the government starts asking questions about unreported income, or tries to negate other benefits? Poverty is an undeniable risk factor for many health issues, yet even familial love and easy-access public assistance can’t necessarily catalyze health care enrollment.
Without a completely public health care system like Canada’s, and without much change in children’s insurance in the foreseeable future, we have to work together to help enroll qualifying kids in these existing (and pretty solid) health care programs. It’s a three prong approach: 1) educating caregivers about health, health care, and common misconceptions surrounding both, 2) providing assistance with and opportunities to apply for health care, and 3) educating children.
The first two we’ve been doing through nonprofits like LIFT and MomsRising, but we need to do much, much more. The third is done more by developing nations’ public health initiatives than in the US, which makes no sense. Especially in a low-income household, parents need reminders about prioritizing healthy habits; if that reminder comes from their kids, they might just listen and act.
Insurekidsnow.gov is the hub for all kid-related health care stuff. They challenged organizations to help out, and now I’m challenging you. Check out this petition I created on change.org and help build the cause. Reblog this to your friends, too!
*I originally wrote this and was going to edit it better and submit it as a sample post to be a blogger for change.org. Life’s been crazy, as some of yall know, so I didn’t finish that application process, but still feel strongly about this. So that’s why it’s a slightly-atypical-but-still-Jen post.
Jen Bokoff 