Covering all Florida’s Children with Health Insurance

Florida has the nation's second-highest percentage of uninsured children, and one recent report places our state atop that list. At least 500,000 of Florida's youngest, most vulnerable citizens do not have health insurance. Children without health insurance do not receive adequate care, do not seek prompt treatment when they are ill, and when they enter a hospital in Florida, they are 1.5 times as likely to die there as are insured children. Working with others to address this problem (and the lack of state-funded outreach), The Movement is engaging in cost-effective targeted enrollment efforts in the Florida KidCare program, particularly through school-based efforts and a local grassroots outreach campaign..

Research

Put simply: More than 12 percent of our children – about 500,000 of Florida's youngest, most vulnerable citizens – do not have health insurance.

This failure hurts our children, and it adds to the economic burden on Florida’s families.

This is not acceptable. Now is the time for action. Florida must provide quality, coordinated health care for all its children.

Study after study shows that children without health insurance do not receive adequate care. A third of uninsured children do not have a regular place of care, compared with only 7 percent of insured children. The result is that uninsured children do not seek prompt treatment when they are ill, and when they finally enter a hospital in Florida, they are 1.5 times as likely to die there as are insured children.

When we allow one of every five Florida children to languish without coverage, we not only compromise their health, we also hinder their success and stifle our state’s economic growth. Research shows that those with better childhood health earn and save more money, are more productive, and are less dependent on welfare and public subsidies.

Children without health insurance will not only miss out on opportunities to succeed in the future – they also are taking a toll on our state’s economy today. Uninsured children tend to visit the hospital more often for problems that could have been avoided through adequate primary care, and they are less successful in school.

When these children seek medical care, the public pays for this “uncompensated” care. The cost of uncompensated care for uninsured children and adults in Florida was around $2.9 billion in 2005 and will rise to more than $4 billion in 2010. To help pay for this, each insured Florida family suffers a hidden $1,400 insurance premium surcharge, and each insured Florida individual pays a $510 hidden surcharge.

Here are two ways to fix this:

• We must insure all of Florida's children. Most of Florida’s uninsured children are already eligible for Florida KidCare, our state’s health insurance program for children without private insurance, but many parents don't know that their children are eligible or may not know how to enroll in the program. We must launch a grassroots and mass media effort to make sure that all of Florida’s families have the facts about KidCare and, if eligible, can enroll. We also must expand KidCare eligibility to children of state employees and to families that earn 201-300 percent of the federal poverty line in order to take advantage of federal funding and enroll more kids.
• We must make sure that children have what is called a “medical home.” This means having a provider who knows the child, has access to health records, and who can make sure that care is coordinated. Coordinated care cuts down on costs, both by improving prevention and by limiting duplicative care. North Carolina launched a coordinated care effort several years ago that saved the state an astounding $231 million for fiscal years 2005 and 2006.

Read the full proposal here.