Lack of Family Health Insurance Relegates Poor Kids to ERMay 2008
What do you do if you don't have
family health insurance, you don't qualify for subsidized medical insurance, and your child gets sick?
You do what millions of frightened parents do every year: you take your child to the ER and hope to get important treatment at a price that won't drive you into bankruptcy.
This week the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality released a study revealing that in the year 2005 lower-income children were in the emergency room almost twice as often as higher income children.
Without family health insurance, even simple childhood sicknesses and injuries can progress to an emergency room trip. This is why 96% of those visits in 2005 were for things like respiratory conditions, cuts and bruises, ear infections, and muscle sprains.
Those kids whose parents can afford
medical insurance could simply call their general practitioner for treatment, leading to earlier care, shorter wait times, and smaller medical bills.
Facts on:
Medical Insurance and the ER
Did you know...
Low income children are in the emergency room twice as often as high income children?
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There's been much debate over how to cover children in the last year; Barack Obama wants to make medical insurance mandatory for all children, and arguments over the expansion of SCHIP (the State Children's Health Insurance Program) have been raging through Washington with a lot energy.
But it's also important to remember this: while low income children are landing in the emergency room for their injuries, where do mom and dad go when they get sick or hurt? This is why family health insurance is so important, and should be the topic of much more conversation. Kids need health care, but parents need to be healthy too, so they can do a good job of looking after their little ones.
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