US Children And Health Insurance Coverage

According to some statistics, there are approximately 9 million children in the United States that do not have any form of health insurance coverage. If the children that do not have health benefits at some point throughout the year, the figure jumped to almost 18 million.

Researchers state that having a stable line of health insurance coverage that allows children consistent access to health care will promote better health overall. If there are gaps in coverage or no coverage at all, the more health problems may not get the proper attention they need.

There are some additional discrepancies in attempts to provide coverage to more children. One policy is to provide public coverage to the uninsured parents, thus providing a way to expand coverage to children. Yet, these same policies ignore families that may have one parent that is already insured yet no insurance coverage for children.

One study suggested that about 3.3% of children and adolescents did not have health insurance-even though they had one parent with coverage. 27% of uninsured children had an insured parent or guardian. Socio-economic factors played a role in some statistics.

The figures indicated that 3 million children had some form of coverage loss or gap despite having an insured parent. More than a million were without health insurance all year long.

Such figures lead many to suggest the necessity of public health insurance for every person in the family. This is not always a popular idea in the US, but the facts remain. It also remains to be seen whether flagging employer-based healthcare systems will remain sustainable. Such private systems are showing that they are just not affective to cover everyone in the family, especially children.

Conclusions reached by researchers also underscore the importance of using limited public health insurance programs to provide the broadest level of coverage for children in the United States for the time being. Yet, this does not dismiss the need for long-term solutions for providing universal health insurance for children-and perhaps families as a whole.