Surely that’s not too much to ask.
It’s constitutional – deal with it
Five nonprofit organizations and community groups in Texas, including three in the Houston area, have been awarded a combined $4.78 million by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to boost efforts to enroll the state’s nearly three-quarters of a million uninsured children, the federal agency announced on Monday.
Texas leads the nation not only in the number of overall uninsured but also in the number of children under age 18 who lack health insurance coverage. More than one in 10 Texas children 18 and younger remain uninsured, according to an U.S. Census analysis and other studies.
The awards to Texas organizations are designed to get more eligible children enrolled in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, commonly known as CHIP.
The Texas groups receiving funds are Gateway to Care, a Houston-based collaborative assisting in access to health care; Lone Star Legal Aid, also of Houston; Children’s Defense Fund-Texas in Bellaire; the Bexar County Hospital District’s University Health System in San Antonio; and the Community Council of Greater Dallas.
Surely we can all agree that having healthy children is in everyone’s best interest. That means ensuring that all children have access to health care, including dental care, which in turn means getting all eligible children enrolled in CHIP. The return on the investment is pretty good, but beyond that, it’s just the right thing to do. This is a concrete and relatively inexpensive thing we can do for the children that we claim as a society to value. You would think that for the political party that is obsessed with “unborn” children and imaginary predators in public bathrooms, that enrolling as many eligible children as possible in CHIP would be a no-brainer. Sadly, that self-proclaimed concern form children never seems to extend that far. It’s a good thing we have the federal government and a passel of caring non-profits to step in and fill the gap.