After a decade of progress, the number of uninsured children went up last year nationwide. In an annual report released Thursday, the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families found more than 275,000 children became uninsured in 2017, bringing the number without coverage to 4 million.
Kansas' uninsured rate was 5.2 percent in 2017, slightly above the 2016 rate. But Emily Fetsch, director of policy and research for Kansas Action for Children, is worried the state could move farther backward if it doesn't consider expanding Medicaid. She notes that three-quarters of children who lost coverage in 2017 live in states that haven't expanded the program.
"With the general decline with insurance that we're seeing, particularly among states that haven't expanded Medicaid, I'm worried that Kansas could see a decline if we don't do more to expand coverage," she states. Voters in neighboring Nebraska and two other states decided to expand Medicaid this year. The report estimates that the number of uninsured children in Kansas increased from about 34,000 in 2016 to 39,000 in 2017. Joan Alker, executive director of the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families, says this is the first time since the university started analyzing data eight years ago that no state made progress in covering children.
Alker notes that this backslide comes in a year when the Trump administration cut the budget for publicizing affordable health coverage. She adds that families also were watching a steady stream of congressional efforts to shrink programs designed to help working families, which she believes created an "unwelcome mat" effect. "Congress was trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act for much of the year," she points out. "Congress was trying to cut Medicaid. "And then, Congress let funding for the Children's Health Insurance Program expire Sept. 30 of that year, and it took them many months to actually get the CHIP program extended."
Alker says it's in the nation's best interest to build upon years of bipartisan progress in reducing the number of uninsured children.
