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January 11, 2005

530,000 Children left behind

Record Number Of Applications Floods KidCare

Florida ranks third among the states in numbers of uninsured children, estimated at 600,000, Ray said.

The Legislature last year ended a 70,000-child waiting list for KidCare and provided open-enrollment periods. Lawmakers also tightened requirements, but changes led to additional paperwork and confusion for parents trying to renew their policies.

The state dropped about 78,000 children recently after their parents didn't provide paperwork in time.

Since legislators streamlined the process during a special session in December, about 27,000 children have been reinstated, Naff said.

Remember: the Leg ended the waiting list by simply eliminating it. They just tore up the waiting list. Problem solved.

Now, 78,000 more kids were just kicked out of the program, and though 27,000 managed to scratch their way back in, there’s hundreds of thousands of uninsured kids, so Low-income families face rush for insurance plan

Nearly 50,000 low-income families who were swamped in a paperwork logjam last month remain out of the state's Healthy Kids insurance program.

But state officials said Monday that those children can reenroll anytime, and the lessons learned from that chaos should make it easier for them to reenroll into the system.

Healthy Kids Executive Director Rose Naff expects about a third of the 50,000 seeking coverage renewal to qualify for the state-subsidized health insurance program, and she said all of those who do qualify will get in.

But there is no such guarantee for the 180,000 children from about 100,000 families who are expected to apply for the first time this month, the only open-enrollment month for the program until September.

Those children will have to compete with each other and with those renewing their coverage for roughly 70,000 slots, and Naff said the program has received applications for more than 40,000 children in the first week of the period. The deadline for open enrollment is Jan. 31.
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But (Chief Financial Officer Tom) Gallagher said people need to apply as early as possible, as the 70,000 available slots could fill up before the deadline.

The rush to apply to the program, which has more than 280,000 enrolled children whose parents pay $15 or $20 a month for health coverage, could be a sign of the difficulty parents in the state have finding affordable health coverage.

70,000 available slots. 600,000 uninsured kids. 40,000 applications in one week.

The kids whose parents fail to get applications in immediately will once again fall through the cracks. It’s far cheaper to keep these children healthy now with preventative medicine than to try to treat them in emergency rooms when things get really bad, but Jeb! and the rest of the GOP gang just hate the idea of poor people getting a break on anything, so the waiting list, which shed a continuous light on the problem, will never reappear, and we’ll only hear about the great uninsured masses once or twice each year.

Posted by Norwood at January 11, 2005 04:47 PM
Comments

With Mr. Bush's no child left behind I have trouble finding an orthopedic doctor willing to fix a kid's arm that is shaped like a pretzel. I work in an er and have spent hours on the phone trying to cajole, shame or pacify some physician to accept these kids who are on medicaid or have no insurance. It's outrageous that there is no system which gets these kids taken care of.

pj

Posted by: pat jean at January 11, 2005 09:25 PM