Shouldn't communities be judged by how they treat their children?

Miryam Bujanda, Methodist Healthcare Ministries' manager of public policy and advocacy has been trying to goad Texas into dealing with its kids' health issues for years.

Texas leads the nation in uninsured residents. More alarming is how many kids are uninsured. They will raise our state's long-term health-care costs and diminish productivity.

These are kids who don't get regular checkups, so their maladies aren't caught early, when they can be inexpensively treated. Too often these children end up in very expensive, publicly funded emergency rooms and hospitals, all at county taxpayers' expense.

Asked about the Legislature's rejection of a bill to allow families earning as much as four times the poverty level to enroll their kids in the Children's Health Insurance Program, Bujanda said, “I'm very disappointed because it was a next-to-nothing CHIP expansion to enroll only 80,000 of the 1.5 million who are uninsured.

“We need to tackle the 750,000 Texas kids who are eligible but not enrolled in CHIP or Medicaid.”

Both insured and uninsured statistics for Texas reflect how widespread poverty and near-poverty are in the Lone Star State.

Medicaid insures children of families that live in poverty, while Texas CHIP insures kids whose families earn as much as twice the poverty level.

In 2003, 1,643,284 children were enrolled in Medicaid, or 25.5 percent of all Texas kids. By 2007, however, their number had only grown to 1,850,714, or 27.2 percent of children.

In Bexar County, the Medicaid rolls grew from 124,376 children in 2003 (28.9 percent of all Bexar kids) to 138,472 (30.7 percent) in 2007.

The CHIP rolls are even more disturbing. When Congress approved CHIP, the intent was to make it as accessible as possible. When our Legislature finally voted to participate in CHIP — which brings $2.63 of federal money for every state dollar spent on it — easy accessibility was also kept in mind.

But in 2003, a $10 billion budget shortfall was largely made up by making it harder to apply and stay on both CHIP and Medicaid, and reducing both programs' benefits.

So while 506,068 kids were on Texas' 2003 CHIP rolls, 31,025 of them in Bexar County, by 2007, only 300,262 were on Texas' rolls and 20,816 on the Bexar County lists.

High rates of uninsured are already evident in many health indicators that are worsening. Statewide, Bujanda said, childhood obesity is alarmingly high and rising rapidly, for example.

Already, 28.8 percent of Texas children — and 30.2 percent of Bexar County's — are obese, making them candidates for chronic illnesses ranging from diabetes to coronary diseases. And at the current rate, 42.6 percent of Texas children and 42.7 of Bexar County's will be obese in 2040.

“Now, after the session is over, (Speaker Joe) Straus says CHIP is an interest he wants to focus on during the interim,” Bujanda mused. “But the opportunity to do something was during the session.”

We can't let this shameful situation continue.