1.3 million Cal kids lack health insurance
The nation has 8.6 million children who lack public or private health insurance and 1.3 million of them are in California, Families USA, a Washington-based advocate for expanded health access, says in a report based on new census data.
California, the nation’s most populous state, is just behind Texas in the numbered of medically uninsured children, Families USA says, and at 12.5 percent has the nation’s 12th highest rate. Texas is No. 1 at 20.5 percent.
Families USA, confirming previous reports, says that 88.2 percent of uninsured children come from families with at least one working adult. Families without earned income usually qualify for one of the public medical plans such as Medi-Cal. It’s been estimated that more than 6 million of the state’s 38 million residents lack health insurance.
Last year, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger tried and failed to gain legislative approval of a plan to cover virtually all of California’s uninsured residents. The full Families USA report is available here.
Related posts:
- 1.3 million California kids lack dental health insurance 1.3 million California kids lack dental health insurance...
- Grim Health Picture For California’s Low-income Kids No improvement in health insurance coverage: The proportion of children ages 0-5 in California who lacked health insurance for all or part of the previous year - one in ten children - remained unchanged between 2001 and 2005....
- Coverage at the county level in California Plenty has changed since 2006, the latest year that the uninsured of California was counted by the U.S. Census. But even then, many months before the current recession hit, the percentage of people living without health insurance in our state was startling. This week, the Sacramento Bee laid out the statistics, finding quite a disparity [...]...
- Public Health Insurance Would Be Too Good and We’d Like It Too Much A common thread is emerging in the right wing response to healthcare reform. Its opponents aren’t claiming that public healthcare will be bad. Rather, they are terrified that the new system will be so good that no citizen would buy expensive private insurance–or vote for politicians who wanted to take public insurance away. The Obama [...]...
- California Children at Risk of Losing Health Insurance Coverage Thousands of California children could lose health insurance coverage in the coming months as a result of changes in Medi-Cal rules and decreased funding for local efforts that have provided coverage to children, the Los Angeles Times reports. Medi-Cal is California’s Medicaid program. State lawmakers will require parents of children enrolled in Medi-Cal to renew [...]...