Houston Chronicle, Aug. 4, 2005, 8:03AM
Report stresses plight of uninsured The data shows about 33 percent of those children did not see a doctor for a year by PETULA DVORAK, Washington Post
WASHINGTON - Among the millions of uninsured children, many of them African-American and Latino, one in three goes an entire year without seeing a doctor, according to a new report by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
"The number of uninsured children continues to be in the millions. No child should go without health care," said U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona.
Carmona addressed this week's kickoff event for "Covering Kids and Families," the foundation's annual campaign to encourage parents to sign up their children for health insurance.
An assortment of soccer stars, entertainers, health care officials and politicians joined Carmona for the release of the statistics at a health fair here.
Among attendees was Sylvia Harris, who scrapes together $500 a month to keep her four grandchildren on her family's health plan. But she may be eligible for federal or state insurance programs she never considered, a counselor told her.
"I always thought that I could never get help," Harris said after hearing the news.
Nationally, an average 33 percent of uninsured children did not see a doctor for a year, a number that is more concentrated in minority populations, according to the report.
Twenty percent of uninsured African-American children went a year without a doctor visit, said Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, president and chief executive of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
"Inequality in health care is just plain unacceptable in our great country," she said.
The foundation's program tries to make health insurance enrollment a back-to-school priority.
The health fair was the first of thousands to be held nationwide in the next few months, Lavizzo-Mourey said.
With a spicy musical public service announcement recorded by salsa legend Willie Colon, the effort also will target Latino populations.
"I grew up in a very poor neighborhood. We didn't go to the doctor - we went to the emergency room," Colon said of his childhood in the Bronx, N.Y., where his uninsured family went to the hospital only if they thought "we really weren't going to make it."
Meredith Josephs sees that kind of thinking daily at La Clinica del Pueblo, where she is medical director at the free clinic.
Many patients are eligible, she said, but the language barrier and fear that illegal immigrants will be turned in to authorities often keep Latino families from applying.
In other neighborhoods, the complexity of the system keeps some families from getting insurance.
Studies document improvements in coverage once states simplify their qualification process, said Cindy Mann, a research professor at Georgetown University's Health Policy Institute.
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