Californians march to save children’s health care

The California’s budget situation is reaching critical condition, and the state’s S-CHIP program, known as Healthy Families, is on life support. With Governor Schwarzenegger proposing to pull the plug, protesters—including 150 children currently covered by Healthy Families—have descended on the Capitol today to express their opposition to the cuts.

The demise of the popular program, which covers more than a million moderate-income children, would have dire consequences. A UCLA report released this week says that the expected massive cuts in the state work force could hike California’s unemployment rate to more than 12 percent, creating the worst job market in the state in decades. And many families will lose their employer-based health insurance along with their jobs at a time when they can least afford to buy private insurance.

The termination of the Healthy Families program would also mean the state will lose additional federal matching funds, exacerbating the damage to state services—the state’s Medicaid program, Medi-Cal, ia also under the budget knife. The legislature’s budget conference committee has opted for a $70 million cut to Healthy Families, rather than eliminating it. But such a huge cut would create waiting lists and deny coverage to an estimated 200,000 kids.

But the fate of the Healthy Families Program has not yet been decided. The protesters today come to Sacramento to share how losing health coverage will affect their health, their school attendance, and their lives—and will ask the Governor and the Legislature to find a way to use the state’s "rainy day fund" to keep the program alive and healthy.

—Betsy Imholz, Special Projects Director, Consumers Union, West Coast Office

Comments

[Cleaves M. Bennett MD]

I have been a doctor for 50 years. I have never seen it so bad. The problem with costs has to do with the worsening health of Americans. One out of five American 4 years old children are obese. Not overweight, obese! Think about that for a minute, what the future holds for them. Diabetes, fatty liver, and kidney failure in their teens ending up on dialysis.
Nearly 1 in 2 teenagers is overweight or obese. Many of them end up as obese adults. National survey data show that the prevalence of overweight and obese adults in the U.S. has increased steadily over the past three decades. If these trends continue, more than 86 percent of adults will be overweight or obese by 2030. The Pediatricians are recommending treating high cholesterol in kids as young as 8. No one has tested statins in that age group. Cholesterol is used to build every cell in the body and all the sex hormones. That big organ up there between your ears is made of cholesterol. Will kids on statins grow up normally, do well in school and have normal sexual development? No one knows. Will kids on statins avoid heart attacks in later life? No one knows. Big Pharma has successfully demonized cholesterol so Americans of all ages are taking statins with little evidence it is helping them other than changing their blood tests results. Read “Bad Cholesterol is good marketing” at the website nomoremedicines.com to learn more. I call Big Pharma the Somali Pirates of the Health Care industry.