At Children’s Defense Fund, our commitment to equity is at the heart of what we do. It is why our organization works at a deeper level to address certain social determinants and inequities that can harm the health of children who have fewer privileges than their peers.
CDF has an agenda around which there should be no controversy. We believe every child should have access to healthy food. We believe every child should be able to receive a high-quality education in schools and play safely on playgrounds. We believe every child should be shielded from some of the dangerous aspects of social media.
And we believe that every young person should have access to quality, affordable health care. Full stop.
So, you can imagine the concern I have felt reading numerous headlines, like these, over the last two weeks: “Kids in many states wrongly removed from Medicaid,” wrote The Washington Post. “Many children may have lost Medicaid coverage,” The New York Times detailed. “An ‘obscene’ number of kids are losing Medicaid coverage,” reported CNN.
We are going backward. America is going backward. It must stop.
On this singular issue, there are devastating outcomes that can occur if every child does not have access to health care. Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families (CCF) notes when children are uninsured, they are more likely to have unmet medical and dental needs that can diminish their quality of life.
Unfortunately, that prospect is becoming real as KFF, formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation, reports a spike in the number of children who have lost that basic protection: KFF says at least 1.1 million children (about the population of Montana) have already been dropped from Medicaid coverage in America this year. And that data only reflects the situation in fifteen states. Georgetown CCF researchers indicate up to 6.7 million kids across the country are at risk of losing Medicaid benefits.
Why is this happening?
States have been allowed to, once again, cull Medicaid rolls of residents they believe no longer qualify for the program. States were given the opportunity to make these determinations when a pandemic relief program expired earlier this year, according to KFF.
This has left young people in limbo as their health care, in many cases, has been taken away thanks to paperwork mistakes and technological malfunctions.
Some states, like Texas, are making Medicaid decisions at an unnecessary, breakneck speed. Our team there is aggressively advocating for Medicaid expansion and helping to make sure eligible children and families have lifesaving health care coverage, as the Tyler Morning Telegraph showed last month.
“[The state is] disenrolling many, many eligible kids at the cost of more quickly disenrolling the few who are no longer going to be eligible,” CDF-Texas Health Policy Manager Adrienne Lloyd recently told both Spectrum News 1 Austin and The New York Times.
This is completely unacceptable.
We all know who stands to lose the most in this situation: poor Black and Brown young people. It is unfair for them to face yet another setback in a society that deals them obstacle after obstacle to overcome compared to their peers. The ability to live a healthy life, in the world’s wealthiest country, should be made no harder for them than anyone else.
I am encouraged that President Joe Biden’s administration has urged officials to pause procedural disenrollments of Medicaid in states where their systems have been deemed faulty, per Axios. However, more must be done.
State and federal lawmakers should be working to ensure ALL young people, no matter their socioeconomic background, have access to quality, affordable health care. We must advance innovative policies and practices that aim to make that goal an attainable reality.
Furthermore, we must widen the scope of our work to address all the social determinants that play such a significant role in the health outcomes of our children and youth.
Let’s restore universal free meals in our schools. Let’s incentivize behavioral health care for young people. Let’s invest in more environmental justice initiatives.
After all, when our children and youth succeed, we all succeed. Let’s give them the healthy start they need.
