Further medical care would be received at private clinics and hospitals, but the community care center would be the manager of care for all children who live in the area. Healthy Kid would also cover pregnant women, again with co-payments tied to income. Healthy Kid would increase immunizations among all children, especially those in low-income areas. It would provide a place to go for continuing care, a place known to teens, so that family planning services and prenatal care could be conveniently obtained. Finally, Healthy Kid would obviate a number of programs that provide limited services or services to a limited set of persons and so would save the government money.
Children are relatively inexpensive to cover.
Including all of them in one program would avoid a dual-quality system, ensure access to basic preventive services, and provide access to family planning and prenatal care. Providing coverage for children would reduce the cost of employer-based insurance and other private coverage, thereby increasing the probability of greater private coverage for adults. Locating health care providers in communities would increase the likelihood that residents would use the appropriate clinic rather than emergency rooms and other expensive and inefficient forms of care. In addition to implementing the Healthy Kid program, Congress could also cap the tax subsidy on employer-based health insurance. This could be done so as to reflect the actuarial cost of insurance without the cost of children or pregnant women, since they would be covered separately.