SACRAMENTO — California's promising strides toward extending medical coverage to all its children, a longtime goal of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and one advocates believed was in reach by decade's end, has stalled -- and thousands of kids are in danger of losing insurance.
The trend is likely to further destabilize California's already shaky healthcare system. Studies have found that children without insurance are less likely to go to the doctor for routine visits that allow early diagnoses and treatment for diabetes, obesity and other increasingly common ailments.
Uninsured children are more likely to end up in the hospital or in the state's clogged emergency rooms, where much of the cost of their care is passed along to insured people through higher premiums. Uninsured children tend to perform worse in school and miss more classes than those with coverage, several studies have found.
Between 2001 and 2005, the number of Californians younger than 19 who were uninsured at any given time decreased 25% to about 763,000, according to the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.
Most of the drop came through aggressive enrollment efforts in state and private healthcare programs and despite the erosion of employer-based insurance, which was leaving more adults without coverage.
But legislative budget negotiators this year have decided to increase premiums for the state's Healthy Families program, which pays for medical care for more than 850,000 children of low-income workers who are above the federal poverty line.
The state estimates that the parents of 19,000 children will end up dropping out of the program by July because of the $2 or $3 monthly increases. A family with three or more children, earning between two and 2 1/2 times the federal poverty level of $24,800 a year, would see the monthly premium rise to $51.
Lawmakers also have decided to require the parents of 3.4 million Californians who are below the federal poverty line to renew their Medi-Cal health coverage every six months.
The Schwarzenegger administration expects that rule will pare Medi-Cal rolls by about 196,000 children over the next two years.
State officials say some of those families would leave the program anyway either because they moved or found jobs, but advocates believe many who are entitled to the program will fail to file the paperwork and will fall off the rolls.
