October 27, 2016 – Andrea Sears, Public News Service (PA)
Children with health insurance are more likely to do well in school. (U.S. Navy/Wikimedia Commons)
HARRISBURG, Pa. — Pennsylvania has reduced the number of uninsured children by almost 25 percent in two years, but advocates say there’s more to be done.
A report released Thursday by the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families showed that between 2013 and 2015, the number of children without health insurance in the state dropped by 36,000, achieving an overall insured rate of almost 96 percent.
George Hoover, health policy director at Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children, said implementation of the Affordable Care Act was a big part of the progress.
“Pennsylvania was one of the states that expanded Medicaid to be able to provide coverage to uninsured adults,” Hoover said. “And quite often, when you insure the uninsured adults you’re also going to be able to insure their children.”
While the gains put the Keystone State slightly above the national average for insured children, there were still more than a 100,000 who remained uninsured – the seventh largest number in the country.
Joan Alker, director of the Georgetown Center and co-author of the report, said that getting health insurance to 95 percent of children nationally was a historic milestone, but she said all children need to be covered.
“And that’s because health coverage is so important for kids,” Alker said. “It allows them to access primary preventive care, they’re more likely to attend school, graduate from high school and even go to college.”
She said that strengthening Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act and the Children’s Health Insurance Program will be critical for further progress.
Hoover said that raising public awareness of the availability of health insurance programs that cover children and families will help too.
“We need to also try and streamline and simplify the process for families so that getting coverage and keeping coverage is something that they’re able to do without a lot of difficulty,” he said.
Expanding children’s access to health coverage has been shown to benefit not only the children and their families, but schools and the state economy as well.
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