The lie we can’t live with any longer

Nearly everything is harder in the wake of this pandemic, including ignoring certain inconvenient truths.

Take PA’s groundbreaking and national model for the Children’s Health Insurance Program. While CHIP remains one of PCCY’s defining achievements in advocacy, its slogan of “Cover All Kids” is direct and simple, but not true. Instead of covering all kids, it callously excludes an estimated 24,000 vulnerable children across the Commonwealth who, through no fault of their own, are undocumented.

COVID-19 makes plain state lawmakers went out of their way to rule out these children not only harms children by depriving them of their basic right to healthcare, but robs all Pennsylvanian’s of an effective public health approach, and saddles the healthcare system with extraordinary and entirely avoidable costs.

Infectious diseases, such as the novel Coronavirus, don’t discriminate by political affiliation, income, or immigration status, but state legislation does. And during this crisis, the health of these children is in an even more precarious situation because the shutdown of schools mean they can’t reach out to school nurses, counselors or other school staff for help. The lives of these children, as well as their families, are at risk.

“Lawmakers need to understand that when children get sick, they’re less likely to get care if they’re uninsured, like the thousands of undocumented children in Pennsylvania,” Dr. Karen Wang, a pediatrician at the Berks Community Health Center and district physician for the Reading School District, told PCCY. “But with COVID-19, the stakes are higher and the need to extend CHIP coverage to all children has never been greater.”

When uninsured children get sick, often their lack of health care access means minor issues develop into serious issues and they head to hospital emergency rooms, which must be paid for by the hospital or health care system. Given the pandemic-related fiscal emergency that many hospitals are facing, this longstanding healthcare gap further exacerbates their financial pressures when they, and all Pennsylvanians, can least afford it. In fact it costs twice as much in uncompensated hospital care to treat undocumented children than it would to extend CHIP coverage to them, not to mention the additional cost to the social safety net undertaken by counties and the Commonwealth for their lack of health care access.

This is why six other states now permit all low and moderate-income children, regardless of their immigration status, to access public health care coverage. Former Illinois’s Republican Governor, Bruce Rauner, renewed that state’s CHIP program in 2017, enjoying bipartisan approach due to the sound fiscal prudence of such a policy. Former Republican Governors of California and Massachusetts were among the first state executives to enact this morally and fiscally responsible measure more than a decade ago.

This COVID-19 crisis is stressing the financial resources of hospital and health care systems across the state in rural, suburban and urban counties. Meanwhile, we know that children who are uninsured and undocumented live in these same rural, suburban and urban parts of the state. As the growing anxieties of Pennsylvanians watching the news every night illustrates, we can’t afford to wait any longer—this dangerous and costly oversight must be remedied now.

Tell your state lawmakers to expand CHIP coverage to these 24,000 children so they can see a doctor well before they need to be rushed to the ER. They’ll not only be supporting beleaguered hospitals, but they’ll be making an indelible impact on the long-term public health of the Commonwealth, as well as helping to put the COVID-19 crisis behind us.