A Critical Safety Net Nationally, one in seven children lacks health insurance, representing 11 million of the 44 million uninsured Americans. For most of them, medical care is a last resort, often associated with severe illness, frantic parents, frustrated physicians, and long waits in emergency rooms of public hospitals. In such settings, there is often a question about quality of care. I just knew something was wrong with him, and it turned out to be a respiratory virus. A walker-talker subsequently signed McKinnis s son up for health insurance, and he s now receiving free prescriptions and preventive care.
Health insurance is a critical safety net for children.
Inferior medical care is linked to unnecessarily serious health problems and, indirectly, to children failing in school due to poor health and extended absences. And, of course, school failure is linked to every social ill in the book. America s health care problems include many paradoxes, including the estimate that 7.3 million of the uninsured children may suffer needlessly because they are eligible for public health insurance. In Louisiana, as in other states, there is a symmetry in the high rates of poverty, health problems, and the lack of insurance coverage among children. The benefits, it turns out, are often surrounded by bureaucratic barbed wire, the stigma of welfare, and misinformation.