An Attempt To Insure More Texas Children
Jan 15th 2008LouiseHealth Insurance Reform
Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbott, has come up with a plan to provide health insurance to uninsured children in the Texas child support system. Texas state and federal law already require that non-custodial parents ensure that their children have health insurance, but that doesn’t mean that all of them do. The state estimates that 200,000 children in the child support system are currently without health insurance, and Abbot’s plan would attempt to rectify the situation.
Under the new proposal, a private Texas health insurance carrier would contract with the state to provide health insurance for the children. Courts could order parents to buy the health insurance for their children, and income levels would be taken into consideration to determine a parent’s ability to pay for the policy. Since the system would be set up through the state, courts would also be able to payroll deduct a child’s health insurance premiums from a parent’s paycheck.
Any program that aims to reduce the number of Texans without health insurance (currently 5.5 million) is a good start. But I have to wonder why the state wants to set this program up through a private health insurance carrier? Texas, like every state in the US, already has a government-run health insurance system – Medicaid – in place for the poorest of its citizens. Why not just expand that program to cover the uninsured children that Abbott’s proposal targets? The state could still payroll deduct premiums and court order parents to enroll their children. By eliminating the middle man (a private health insurance company) it seems that the program could be more cost effective. No private health insurance company is going to submit a bid unless they will be able to make a profit from the contract. If Texas were to just add more people to the current state health insurance program, more of the funds could be used to provide health care services for the currently uninsured children, instead of creating dividends for the shareholders of whatever private health insurance carrier the state picks to run the proposed program.
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