Is the U.S. experiencing a childrens healthcare crisis?
Marian Wright Edelman: I call it a crisis. One out of every nine children have no health care at all. The effect is devastating. Too many infants are born at low birth weight and die in their first year of life. Uninsured children often go two years without seeing a doctor, even for basic health screenings. And when they go to an emergency room, uninsured children are twice as likely as insured children to die in the hospital. Is the number of uninsured children increasing? Actually it decreased last year — from 9.4 million to 8.9 million — but it was not because more children were covered by private health insurance. Far from it. Private coverage for children continues to erode, and I expect the number to drop again next year as more parents lose their jobs and health insurance due to the economic downturn. The only reason the number of uninsured children wasn’t higher last year was because more children enrolled in two critical safety net programs — Medicaid and S-CHIP. What is yo
