Public health advocates are warning about the consequences of a plan to eliminate funding for Arizona's KidsCare, the state health program covering 47,000 children of the working poor. Gov. Jan Brewer proposed the move to deal with Arizona's $5-billion budget deficit. Critics argue uninsured low-income families would then have only two options: take their children to overwhelmed community clinics or to hospital emergency rooms.
Among the other programs facing cuts is Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System (AHCCCS) Administration, Arizona's Medicaid agency. Tara Plese, director of government and media relations for the Arizona Association of Community Health Care Centers, says that means several clinics around the state may have to close for lack of revenue.
"It wouldn't be in all communities, and it may just be that some of the services that some of these clinics now provide like dentistry or pharmacy, would be the first cut."
If parents have no other health care option for their children except emergency rooms, Plese says everyone who does have insurance will pick up the tab as costs are passed on through higher prices.
Like community health centers, emergency rooms are required by federal law to treat everyone regardless of ability to pay. But, she says the costs must still be covered somehow.
"With the hospitals, when you get all the uncompensated care coming through your ER, then you are going to have to find some way to make up for that cost, and it's going to go back on the commercial insurers."
The public's health will also suffer if thousands of kids, especially six-to-nine year-olds, are left without coverage, she adds.
"That's an age where they're getting another set of immunizations, they're more prone to being sick because they're in school, they're getting sick, other children are getting sick, and it's a time when they probably visit doctors with more frequency."
Arizona's KidsCare program began in 1998, at a time when many employers were either dropping employee health coverage or sharply boosting premiums. State dollars for Kidscare are matched three-to-one by the federal government. |