Covering Kids

Yesterday, a bi-partisan group of legislators, an honor roll of child advocates, and I gathered at Legislative Hall to announce the introduction of a bill I have proposed to use the free and reduced price lunch information that school districts have to locate uninsured families who might be eligible for free or lost-cost health insurance through Medicaid or the CHIP program. You can read about it in today’s News Journal here. We also announced a new program that my office will be pursuing through the state’s school nurses, to try to involve nurses more directly in signing kids up for CHIP.

This bill and the nurse partnership are both great efforts (if I do say so myself), but they aren’t enough. The statistics are grim. There are over 19,000 uninsured kids in Delaware. My optimistic goal with this bill and the nurse program is to increase enrollment by 1,000 kids. That would be a 20% increase in Delaware’s CHIP enrollment—huge by any standard—but our rolls of uninsured kids would still be unacceptable.

That is why getting every kid in Delaware health insurance by 2010 will be one of my primary goals as Lieutenant Governor. That is not a bumper sticker slogan, it is something that a couple of other states are moving towards doing, and that we in Delaware can do as well if we make it a priority. Universal health care coverage for adults and children is my ultimate goal, and I think we will get there. But covering every kid is an important, achievable interim step, and I will be putting my campaign hat on soon and talking about how we should get there.