Of all the suffering brought on by the nation's health care crisis, nowhere is the pain--or the system's failures--more apparent than among the millions of children in America who are sick and uninsured.
Because their parents cannot afford to buy medical insurance for them, growing numbers of uninsured children are deprived of basic medical care. They arrive in hospital emergency rooms, public health clinics and the school nurse's office with acute illnesses and debilitating fevers that could have been prevented, health experts say.
"Basic care is increasingly beyond the reach of millions of American children," said Sara Rosenbaum of the Children's Defense Fund. "Children have definitely borne the brunt of the breakdown in our (health) insurance system."
Children without insurance are nearly 50% more likely to suffer health problems than those in families who do have it, according to Children Now, a statewide nonprofit advocacy group. Uninsured children are much more likely to forgo treatment of medical problems and develop complications that require costly hospitalization.
At the Venice Family Clinic, doctors recalled examining three children during a four-month period last year who were suffering from ear infections that had raged untreated, rupturing the eardrums and, in one case, spreading infection into the mastoid bone near the brain.
These children were referred for surgery to public hospitals, where their care cost taxpayers about $25,000. Yet the medication that could have prevented the problems costs less than $20.
"There is a gaping wound in our health care system when it comes to children," said Dr. J. Donald Thomas, an emergency physician at Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena.
A study comparing hospitalization rates of children throughout Los Angeles County shows that poor children living in East Los Angeles are more than five times more likely to need hospitalization for middle-ear infections than children living in Malibu. Countywide, poor children are seven times more likely to be hospitalized for bronchitis, asthma or gastroenteritis, and 15 times more likely to be hospitalized for pneumonia.
In California, the number of uninsured children increased 62% from 1983 to 1989. About 2.1 million children--more than 25%--had no health insurance in 1989, ranking California among the 10 worst states in the nation, according to Children Now. About 300,000 were younger than 6.
