The health of young children is negatively affected when parents forego health care coverage for themselves or other adult members of the household. Children's HealthWatch finds that children whose families face high health care costs are at increased risk for health problems, developmental delays and food insecurity.

This brief examines the potential effects of health care reform on the more than 25 million children who currently have coverage under Medicaid or the Children's Health Insurance Program. Increased parental coverage will help these children since many have uninsured parents with unmet health needs.

Two Committees in the Senate have been working on separate pieces of health reform legislation. The first, the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee , passed its bill on July 15, 2009. Like the House bill, the HELP Committee's reform legislation would place shared responsibility on individuals, employers, and the government to ensure that most Americans receive health coverage. Key members of the Senate Finance Committee continued bipartisan closed-door meetings to finalize their health reform bill. The full Senate will not vote on health reform legislation prior to its August recess.

Two of the House Committees with jurisdiction over health reform passed legislation out of Committee that would overhaul our nation's health care system. On July 17, the Ways and Means Committee approved the tri-Committee's health reform legislation, the America's Affordable Health Choices Act (H.R. 3200). Later on July 17, the Education and Labor Committee also voted H.R. 3200 out of committee with a vote of 26-22. H.R. 3200 was introduced jointly by the three House Committees on July 14, 2009.

Too many children experience abuse and neglect with negative lifelong consequences. Too few children get the services and supports they need to heal. Yet, proven and promising practices can reduce maltreatment and ameliorate harm. Taking these practices to scale will require federal investment and leadership in five strategic areas. We must: (1) increase prevention and early intervention services that help keep children and families out of crisis; (2) increase specialized treatment services for those children and families that do experience crisis; (3) increase services to support families after a crisis has stabilized (including birth families, as well as kinship and adoptive families created when parents are unable to care for their children); (4) enhance the quality of the workforce providing services to children and families; and (5) improve accountability both for dollars spent and outcomes achieved. Together these efforts will improve the lives of millions of children across the nation

Today, a leading children’s group is praising improvements to made to the House health reform legislation that would guarantee coverage for children’s unique developmental health care needs. Read more from First Focus.

After weeks of debate, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee just passed legislation to transform our broken health care system. And the House of Representatives recently introduced a similar bill which will be debated in three key committees.

These are major steps forward for health care reform.

Both the Senate HELP Committee and House bills propose significant health care advances that would:

(1) End discriminatory practices by insurance companies that deny coverage to people based on pre-existing conditions, or charge higher rates because of gender or health status;
(2) Help make coverage more affordable by capping families' out-of-pocket costs and providing subsidies for low-income families; and
(3) Keep costs under control by getting more for our health care dollars, for example by rewarding doctors for quality (not quantity) of services provided.

We applaud this progress, but the fight continues. There is still a long way to go in both the Senate and the House!

The House is preparing to mark-up health reform legislation in all three committees with oversight over the issue and the Senate Finance Committee is releasing their draft this week or next. We are very concerned about the possibility of children being left worse off in the legislation and need to keep raising awareness about the important issues for children in health reform. We have drafted the following sign-on letter to the House and Senate.

If your organization would like to sign-on to this letter to the House and Senate, please reply to signon@firstfocus.net or contact Cate Hodgetts at catherineh@firstfocus.net if you have any questions or need additional information. Thanks so much for your consideration!!!

By providing state Medicaid programs with $87 billion in fiscal relief, American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) is likely to be effective in preventing many large Medicaid cutbacks. Targeting 35% of assistance to states with particularly high unemployment rates, ARRA will provide more "bang for the buck" in preventing state cutbacks and stimulating the economy than did fiscal relief legislation in 2004, which gave all states the same level of help.