Sen. Andy Kim Thinks Kids Should Have Universal Healthcare. Sure Is Weird That They Don't Already!
But it's a particularly good time to introduce it.
Every year, there are approximately 250,000 GoFundMe campaigns from people seeking help covering their medical bills, and no small number of them are for children. We live in a country in which 66.5 percent of all bankruptcies are related to medical bills — up to 550,000 each year — and 15 percent of those medical bankruptcies are attributable to illnesses and injuries suffered by children. In 2024, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (RIP) found that 100 million Americans owe over $220 billion in medical debt, and that was before people lost their Obamacare subsidies. Not to mention that, since Donald Trump has been in office, drug companies have raised the prices of over 700 medications.
And this is all for people who were able to actually get treatment in the first place. There are a whole lot of people out there, a whole lot of children, who don’t. There are approximately 4.6 million children in the United States who don’t have health insurance — about six percent of the childhood population up to age 18 — and studies show that uninsured children have a mortality rate 60 percent higher than children who are covered. Also, about one in three children in the United States (about 23 million) are underinsured and therefore have less access to healthcare than they need.
We should be deeply, deeply ashamed. We should be ashamed about all of it, frankly, but we should especially ashamed of the fact that there is even a single child in this country that cannot get medical treatment for financial reasons. I mean, Republicans kinda get off on the idea of adults not being able to afford healthcare as a result of not having worked hard enough, but it’s a smidge harder to make that argument when it comes to children.
In order to correct some of this, Sen. Andy Kim (D-NJ) is introducing the MediKids Act, which would automatically enroll all children in Medicare and keep them on it until the age of 26, at which point they would have to switch to the utterly miserable system that everyone else uses. You know, unless they got real used to not having to worry about not being able to afford healthcare and kept voting en masse for candidates who support it.
“As parents, we promise to do all we can to look after the health and safety of our children. Nothing is more essential than caring for our kids, but as a country, we are failing to uphold that same promise,” Senator Kim said, in a press release. “Millions of children are falling through the cracks of our healthcare system, and we are the only ones who can stand up and help. I built MediKids to be a step we can take right now to guarantee every single child in the United States the care they need, when they need it. No kid should go without care in our country.”
The cosponsors on the bill include Kim’s fellow senator from New Jersey, Cory Booker (which seems out of character, although he did pledge to stop taking campaign contributions from corporate PACs and pharmaceutical industry executives in 2019), Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), and Alex Padilla (D-CA).
The bill is also supported by a variety of advocacy organizations, including the American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists (ACOG) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). This is a really big deal, considering the history of organizations representing physicians (cough, American Medical Association, cough) opposing universal healthcare programs.
“Medicaid is first and foremost a children’s program that was created with their health needs in mind, helping families receive everything from milestone checkups, to sick care, to immunizations. Pediatricians see firsthand how Medicaid works for the children and families who rely on it, support that should be available to all children, regardless of where they live or where their parents work, and MediKids would do just that. The American Academy of Pediatrics applauds Senator Kim for his leadership on this bill and urges Congress to advance it,” Andrew D. Racine, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said about the proposed legislation.
Bruce Lesley, president of First Focus Campaign for Children, also made some very good points, stating that “At a time when the uninsured rates for children is rising and children face unacceptably high rates of infant and child mortality, a growing mental health crisis, and declining immunization rates, Senator Andy Kim’s MediKids bill puts children back on the path toward ensuring all children have health coverage and improved access to care. No child in this country should go without healthcare simply because of what their parents earn, their zip code, or whether they can navigate a complex and fragmented healthcare system. In an effort to improve the health, development, and well-being of children, MediKids represents the kind of ambitious, child-centered thinking that the moment demands for our children and grandchildren.”
Want to send us money in an entirely different way? Click here or join our Patreon!
As much as I would love true universal healthcare for everyone, this is one way to get people to dip their toes into those waters and see that it’s not quite as scary as they had imagined. I’d say it’s less of a risk in that way than a public option — which could go very, very wrong if only unhealthy people and poor people signed up for it and doctors were allowed to refuse to take it, as they are with Obamacare. (Here in Chicago, the average enrollee only has access to about 14 percent of doctors in the area. When I was on it, I had a hell of a time finding ones who weren’t scammy or skeevy.) By requiring the wealthy to also have some skin in the game, because their kids will be using it as well, we can ensure that they will use their considerable political power to advocate for keeping the program high quality for all children.
It’s also a particularly opportune time to introduce such legislation, given the fact that Republicans have gone all crazy pronatalist and are constantly freaking out over the birthrate (we know they mean the white birthrate). It would be pretty awkward for them to say, “No, we think that having a kid should put people in danger of going bankrupt should that kid have health problems.” Especially given their outrage over parents choosing abortion when it’s clear that, once born, the child will have severe medical issues.
Then again, I’m probably being optimistic. It’s hardly as though they have much problem with hypocrisy when it comes to their great love of fetuses and their positions on social programs that help children. But it is a point in our favor that most of the arguments the anti-universal healthcare crowd on both sides use — e.g. that people will be lazy and won’t worry about making bad personal decisions about their health; that people need “consequences” for not working hard enough to afford good insurance; that unions will lose something they bargained for — simply do not apply to children.
I do not have or plan to have kids, but I am more than happy for my tax dollars to go to children’s healthcare, because, in the words of Ms. Whitney Houston, I believe the children are our future. Also, because I am not a sociopath.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
My feeling is that there's been a tectonic shift over the last few decades among physicians. Not many of them see themselves as Marcus Welby, M.D. Most of them are working on salary from big hospitals and health-care groups, and they're horrified as they watch patients suffer because of the dreadful system we have, and as rural hospitals (especially) get pumped-and-dumped by rapacious private-equity operators.
One voice in all this I've come to really love is a guy who goes by "Dr. Glaucomflecken", who's on instagram or tiktok or one of those things, easily found on youtube. In real life he's a ophthamologist, and apparently a wonderful doctor, but he is also a comic genius. Most of his posts are hilarious sketches making fun of various medical specialties, but he often does really black-comic stuff about health insurance companies and sometimes dead-serious posts about particularly egregious examples of greed in medicine.
Basically, doctors are no longer the problem.
OT: Ha! Hubby just found the little baggie of carrot sticks I snuck into his coat pocket so he'd have a healthy snack at the office.