Texas must tackle issue of uninsured children

This editorial is from the May 5th issue of the Austin American Statesman, you can read it here. The editorial begins with a statistic, that we lead the all other states in this category. We just talked about this in class so I know this is one of those embarrassing statistics that we'd rather not say out loud. Yes, we lead the nation in the percentage of uninsured children, that's 1.5 million children, 22% of all kids. This has been the case for more than a decade. Two new bills are trying to cut down on the number of uninsured children. One is the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) which would insure an additional 80,000 children in Texas. Another bill is looking at expanding the medicaid enrollment period from six months to 12 months. I had no idea that families have to prove their eligibility every six months and lawmakers purposely designed the system that way knowing that many families would drop out because of late applications or errors processing the applications. Personally I agree with the editorial board that the problem of the largest number of uninsured children in the nation is something that needs to be addressed and these bills would help get more children insured. It appears that Republicans generally oppose expanding health insurance for children which is why we currently have the largest number of uninsured children. The programs from these bills will be paid for by President Obama's stimulus package for Medicaid which I assume is why both parties are working together on this issue. The funds will only last two years but I guess we won't have to worry about those consequences for another two years.