The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports that proposals being considered by the Senate Finance Committee to change subsidies that help low and moderate-income families afford health insurance could push more poor families out of the system.

The National Immigration Law Center warns that, so far, there are no proposals as part of health care reform to remove the five year waiting period and other barriers to Medicaid for most legal immigrants, including children.

President Obama recently announced a new summer service initiative in partnership with the Corporation for National and Community Service. Local service projects can find volunteers and volunteers can find projects in education, health, energy, the environment and more.

About 60 percent of the federal stimulus money is going to states and localities for health and education. Track how states are managing the red tape and using the money, with the help of these new Stateline.org reports.

In this brief, Children's HealthWatch finds that the prevalence of food insecurity in a five-city sample of low-income families with young children increased from 18.5 to 22.6 percent between 2007 and 2008. This is the largest year-to-year change seen in the dataset since 2001 and suggests that we are likely to see significant increases in food insecurity when the U.S. Department of Agriculture issues its own statistics for 2008 later this year.

Turning Point: The Long Term Effects of Recession-induced poverty

Following four cohorts of children who lived through post-war American recessions for up to twenty years of adulthood, researchers at First Focus compared the differences in outcomes along income, employment, education, and health variables for three different categories of children: those who fell into poverty during a recession, those who stayed out of poverty during a recession, and those who were already living in poverty even before the recession began.

The Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2009 (CHIPRA) enacted in February contains several provisions to reduce the harmful impact of Medicaid’s citizenship documentation requirement, which has caused many eligible citizen children to lose or be denied coverage since its 2006 enactment. By implementing these changes immediately, states can lighten the burden that the requirement imposes on otherwise eligible families.

Witnessing violence in high-crime urban areas could increase levels a hormone in young children that could cause long-term health problems such as diabetes and heart disease, researchers said.

A new report from Families USA, “Americans at Risk”, takes a closer look at who is uninsured in your state. Families USA examines who was uninsured under the age of 65 for some period of time in 2007 and 2008. As it turns out, the number is a lot higher than is often reported. As the report states, uninsured people go without screenings and preventive care, delay or forgo needed care, and tend to be sicker and die earlier than their insured friends and neighbors. On top of that, uninsured families risk bankruptcy from skyrocketing medical costs and piling medical debt.

A major new study is kicking off to study environmental factors that play a role in asthma, autism and ADHD.