Letter, Opinion Piece Call for Children’s Health Coverage
A recently published letter to the editor and an opinion piece address health care coverage and undocumented immigrant children in California. Summaries appear below.
"Health coverage for all our state's children makes sense on so many fronts," including public health, economic and education, according to a Los Angeles Times letter to the editor by Robert Ross, president and CEO of the California Endowment. Ross continues, "Unfortunately, kids were allowed to be the political pawns in recent budget negotiations, drawn unnecessarily into the ugly debate around immigration." Children's health should be put "ahead of partisan politics," Ross writes (Ross, Los Angeles Times, 7/11).
"Common sense says it is in California's best interest to make certain" that undocumented immigrant children "receive the least expensive, most effective health care possible" while living in the U.S., San Diego Union-Tribune columnist Logan Jenkins writes. However, a Healthy Kids program in the county to expand health care to such children is "not likely" to be approved by the current Board of Supervisors, according to Jenkins.
Jenkins writes that "nurturing" undocumented children's "physical well-being in a doctor's office," rather than a hospital emergency department, "is the right thing to do" from a humanitarian and economic perspective (Jenkins, San Diego Union-Tribune, 7/10).