The Hurting Child Panel Takes on Children's Health Care Crisis
The Eureka Times-Standard Tuesday, May 24, 2005
By James Faulk

EUREKA -- "It's easier to build strong children than it is to repair broken men." Frederick Douglas, the famed former slave and abolitionist of the 19th Century, was quoted Monday at a gathering of advocates and concerned residents as they discussed the lack of health insurance for children.

According to a press release put out by St. Joseph Health System, 3,235 children in Humboldt County do not have health care coverage. Most of these come from working families.

"The costs are very high," said Allan Katz of the Community Health Alliance. "If you don't provide primary care and don't get kids the preventative care they need, you just build bigger problems that need to be taken care of down the line at higher cost." Katz joined several others in a panel discussion on the issue and various approaches under way to help solve the problem.

MaryAnn Gaido of St. Joseph Health System spoke of the impacts of underserved children. High rates of absenteeism leads to lower performance in school, she said, and uninsured kids are more likely to miss class. That can also translate into poorer work performance from parents, who often have to stay home with sick children.

"We want to create a health care system for our children that we have yet to build," Gaido said. That new system -- to replace the current haphazard health care structure -- must be made of four pillars. We must replace the currently cobbled together system, an important problem needs a system to match its importance and complexity, good systems start with the right priorities, and public participation is crucial.

"We can change the patterns we have," she said. Medicare was a system that took an underserved population -- the elderly -- and brought them health coverage. That's a model we can follow, she said.

Building collaborations and bringing people under already existing services is the mission of Dot Campbell of the North Coast Clinics Network, another speaker at Monday's meeting. "I started a little outreach effort and it grew to this," she said. "Let's think smarter and embed this into some community systems and get the systems coordinated and simplified and working better together."

Having St. Joseph Health System as part of the discussion on how to locate and connect children with services is key, said Campbell. "This is where they come. If they're not at the clinics then they are at the hospitals."

These kinds of meetings can also serve to educate people about services that already exist. She pointed out, "This is another information piece to let the community know that a family of four can make up to $47,000 a year and still qualify for Healthy Families."

Katz talked about a program about to lift off the ground in Del Norte County that seeks to cover all the county's children with health insurance, with the help of the California Health Care Foundation. He also asked the room to get involved at a grass roots level to urge the passage of California Senate Bill 437 and Assembly Bill 772. The bills if passed would create an umbrella program to cover all low-income and uninsured children with health insurance. "It has a real chance of passage, so I'm going to do some advocacy," he said. "I'm going to urge this bunch of activists to get active on this issue."