Every morning, newspaper and coffee in hand, I read my newspaper and search for just one article or commentary that addresses how children will wind up after health care reform and every morning I find none. Later, as I’m driving home and listening to the radio and even later, as I’m cooking dinner and watching the evening news, I still find there is no coverage about children in this health care debate. Why is this?
There are 73,941,848 children in the United States in 2008.
There has been tons of media coverage on how possible reform will affect health insurance companies, businesses, drug companies, and seniors – but scant coverage on how this will affect children. Powerful lobbyists make sure their voices are heard and their concerns are met. These voices have been loud – so loud that those speaking out on needs of children have been drowned out.
But finally, an amendment was filed today, authored by Senator Casey, that addresses the status of children in this health care debate. Watch his speech that introduces this bill at and learn more why this bill is critical to ensuring that no child is worse off after health care reform. Minnesota Senators Franken and Klobuchar co-signed this bill and more than 500 national organizations have signed on, too.
We found a way to cover seniors, why haven’t we done the same for children?
The Children’s Defense Fund Leave No Child Behind® mission is to ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities.
Comments
I think it’s because we haven’t pushed for it. The public voice of children is too quiet, too weak to be heard. It gets drowned out by big lobby voices with big bucks behind them. We have a chance right now to take the first big step by making CHIP uniform across the nation …and we can only do it if Congress hears the demand for it. Whenever our children don’t get what they need, we have to take responsibility…it’s our fault and it’s up to us to fix it.
Quality for children should be our highest priority! It needs to be high quality and we need a lot of people out there pushing for it. If this argument could be used to give some more momentum to the whole movement that would be great. I believe that people could really come together around that goal.
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