Health insurance for children Health insurance for children Protecting our children is the first goal of most parents. Love, responsibility and common sense will do the job when they re well, but when they re sick or injured, it takes cash. However, while eligibility requirements and services provided vary widely from state to state and even year to year, in all the states, Medicaid programs have one thing in common.
Parents have to be pretty much broke for their children to qualify.
So while it can be very helpful to some, it s clearly only a partial solution. These are typically families with working parents whose income, no matter how paltry, disqualifies them from Medicaid and who are offered either no or prohibitively expensive health benefits from their employers. Immunizations are obtained either free or at nominal cost from public health departments. And they depend on hospital emergency rooms for fractures, stitches, high fevers, all the acute disasters of childhood and adolescense. The emergency room can patch em up, but when the bills from the hospital itself, the doctors, radiologists, et al, come rolling in, they can be so overwhelming that even the most well-meaning and conscientious can t pay them.