Uninsured Kids and Outreach
Newsweek magazine’s website has a post well worth reading about a new study from the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center showing that 17,000 children died in hospitals over the past two decades because of a lack of health coverage.
It’s important to get the message of this study straight. The researchers are not saying that children are dying because hospitals aren’t caring for them. Rather, according to Newsweek, “kids who show up in the hospital with complications that might have been warded off by preventive care, like chronic diseases such as asthma and diabetes, or once-mild colds that have devolved into pneumonia, are much more likely to die if they don’t have insurance.”
The report says the cause of this problem is quite clear. Programs – Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program – exist to cover children from low-income families. Yet, according to Dr. Paul Wise, director of Stanford University’s Center for Policy, Outcomes and Prevention, some families never hear about these programs because outreach is so poor. Or, in other cases, the bureaucratic paperwork to either enter or remain in these programs is too complex.
We have firsthand experience at the Healthcare Leadership Council in understanding the value of outreach to link uninsured Americans with health coverage resources. A pilot program of ours, Health Access America, conducted initiatives in 10 cities, working closely with community organizations to bring uninsured citizens to neighborhood forums in which they could receive information on health coverage options, enroll in public programs or begin the process of purchasing private insurance. Of the more than 30,000 people who received information from these forums, over half of them ended up with ever private or public health coverage.
As Congress looks for ways to move toward a fully insured America, it’s one thing to put the right programs in place, but lawmakers can’t forget the importance of outreach in bringing those programs to the people who need them.
