The Volusia County pediatrician, who counts Christopher and Cecelia Earl among her patients, knows exactly how their parents feel. When she was a child, she and her younger sister had no health insurance. Although they eventually did get coverage when her father got a job with the fire department, the family couldn't afford the cost of open-heart surgery for her sister and had to sell their home. The idea of school enrollment-based health insurance was proposed in a 1988 article in the New England Journal of Medicine. Two years later, state health and education officials began pushing the idea in Florida, where it found widespread bipartisan support.
Most American children attend school.
In Florida, that means children in the individual county school districts become their own group for health insurance coverage. Communities have to come up with matching funds to participate in the program, from a minimum of 5 percent to a maximum of 40 percent of the total state allocation for the county. Health care organizations and networks make bids to cover children in the Healthy Kids counties, just as a large company seeks bids before settling on group coverage for employees. Keeping the matching grant funds rolling in can be a challenge, say those who are trying to do just that, though programs such as the United Way have been helpful, as have corporate sponsors. And, even though Healthy Kids is a state program, it is administered by county school districts, which adds to employee work loads.