Children Receive Inadequate Health Care - And SCHIP Can Help

At least in urban areas, they do.

Children in the United States are getting less than 50% of health-care in the area of prevention than they should have been getting. In fact, they are getting worse care in comparison with the adults in the country. This is the finding of a new study performed by Seattle Children's Hospital Research Institute.

The research team was led Dr. Rita Mangione-Smith, who is a researcher at Seattle Children's Hospital Research Institute and an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle. The findings are published in the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

What's interesting is the reaction from the pediatric community:

The role of study becomes more crucial in the wake of a presidential veto of the SCHIP bill, which deals with imparting healthcare coverage to millions of children in the USA.

Dr. Lisa Simpson, who is the director of the Child Policy Research Center at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center said that the study provides a significant reason to override the veto. This is because the study indicates that the quality of care given to children is far poorer than it should be. The lack of a well-documented health insurance plan is a major barrier against providing preventive health-care in America.

The data is 10 years old, but there's little reason to think anything is different today. Also the study needed to be adjusted for non-responders, including those in excellent health. Still,  preventative care lagged far behind acute care or chronic care. And SCHIP and insurance is not the only issue:

Expansion of access to care through insurance coverage, which is the focus of national health care policy related to children, will not, by itself, eliminate the deficits in the quality of care.

But lack of access to care because of lack of insurance will only make things worse. And the lack of insurance to cover well child care and especially preventative adolescent care, will certainly impact the data.

The bottom line is that there's work to be done throughout the system to improve quality of care. Health care access (the SCHIP discussion) and health care financing (the larger discussion) need to be considered together with quality of care to improve where we are (you cannot fix one without addressing all three). And if you can't get your kids to a doctor because you don't have insurance, things will only be worse than the problems outlined in this study.

SCHIP is a step, but not the final step, in health reform. The NEJM study drives that point home, while emphasizing the need to get SCHIP done, and move beyond it to get at the other health care aspects that need to be addressed.

Need I remind everyone that Democrats are addressing health care with specific proposals and Republicans are not? And that the public trusts Democrats far more than Republicans to do so (56-26 in the last ABC News-WaPo poll)?

Nah, you knew that.