Do you work with under or uninsured children?

We need your help as we work to end injustice in our country. Nine million children in our country do not have insurance and face barriers to accessing doctors, dentists, and preventive care.

As a health care professional or service provider, have you been faced with under or uninsured patients? Tell us about a struggle you have witnessed in an uninsured or underinsured child’s ability to get the medical help he or she needed.  How have government programs like Medicaid and SCHIP helped children you serve to get good medical care? 

Share your stories by commenting below. Your stories and thoughts will be collected and utilized by Catholic Charities USA as we work with your Members of Congress to develop policies that nuture, protect, and care for our children.

Comments

[Dorothy S. Allen]

I work with Lourdesmont Youth and Family Services, a children’s social services agency located in Clarks Summit, Pennsylvania, and I see first hand the extreme need faced by children from poverty backgrounds.

Lourdesmont Youth & Family Services is a licensed mental health facility which offers residential and day treatment programs for girls and boys, ages 12 through 17, in an academic setting. Lourdesmont operates under the auspices of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, an international community of religiously committed women who follow a 350-year tradition in the field of human services, working especially with the individual troubled or lost in society.

Lourdesmont serves young persons who come from disadvantaged socio-economic family backgrounds. Due to their economic status, many such families cannot afford private health insurance and would face significant barriers to obtaining health care. Due to limited family finances, the majority of the children served by Lourdesmont would not be eligible for the health treatment they need, without government programs like Medicaid and SCHIP. Without adequate health care, including mental health treatment, the future of these children would be grim.

[Dc. Mike Cumnock]

I am the CEO of The Arkansas Sheriff's Youth Ranches, a residential children's program. We also work with a lot of Children in outreach programs. One of the really sad situations we see on a regular basis is the lack of dental care for children. Most of the children we serve are victims of abuse and/or neglect before they come into the system. Many of their parents are drug abusers (mostly Meth) and their manufacture and use of drugs has had an adverse effect on their children's health, both physical and dental. With the lack of funding for children's health we now see a situation where children's teeth are being extracted instead of repaired because there is inadequate funding for prevention and treatment. We see children, who come into the system as victims, being again victimized by having salvagable teeth pulled and correctable problems ignored. These same children also seem to be getting secondary medical care where mental health issues are concerned. All in all they are paying a very high price for something that was done TO them not BY them. As one child told me "I was abused and because of that I have lost everything that was ever important to me, my home, my family, and my health". The "medical" decisions seemingly are being made by accountants and not medical/dental personnel. That is not an insult to accountants it just seems to be that we, as a society, are making poor short term decisions with dire long term consequences! If the measure of any society is how well we treat the most vulnerable among us...

[Kathy Schindler]

We have two children that are considered adult age which are 23 and 25 that are walking around without health insurance. The 25 year old is a college graduate that did not get a F/T job yet using her degree and her 23 yr. old sister is working P/T and trying to finish college going P/T so therefore does not qualify for my husband's insurance. I don't think anybody thinks of this age group of kids/people walking aound without insurance - particularly if they are from a middle-aged, educated-type background. We are too busy helping them maintain their cars and car insurance and cell phones and tuition that we have to draw a line somewhere. Unfortunately, it is with their health ins. Out 19 year old who is a sophomore in college whom just got in a serious car accident about two months ago in the beginning of Sep. This sounds terrible, but all we can think of is just think if it was one of our uninsured kids instead of him? It is a shame that we live in our country of abundance and middle class people are struggling so hard let alone lower-class people. Thanks to the war lasting far longer than predicted and it's original $7 Billion dollar price tag being God only knows hows much higher than that - what kind of nation are our poor children going to be supporting some day? We'll just keep sending our jobs to China. (Everything I pick up is made in China, doing away with out middle class and we'll have movie stars and our corporate CEOs making millions of dollars and the rest of us will be working at Fast Food making a whopping $8.00 an hour.
The sad part is these well-to-do people probably don't even fool around with fast-food. Do you know that if America keeps bankrupting itself the way it is going now, there may not even be a USA in 40 or 50 years if not sooner. (ANd we were once the most blessed, prosperous nation on earth.) I guess God got tired of us slappiing Him in the face and our morals going down the tubes. Please pass on to everyone you have contact with to go see the movie that was just released in theatres last w/e (BELLA), which is a very pro-life movie. If it does not do good it first couple of weeks at the box office, it will be pulled from the theatres. We need to get back to being a decent, moral society - one that doesn't kill their unborn and rationalize any and everything they do wrong.

Sincerely a Catholic and A concerned Parent and Citizen of the Greatest Country on Earth we are slowly decaying and ruining with porn, perversions, poverty, etc.