Issue 1, Number 3 - Fall/Winter 2011

What Our Community Leaders Are Saying About Health Care
Why I Care About Healthy Kids

By Efren Carrillo, Chair of the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors

Soccer, martial arts, and Little League played a huge part in my childhood. I had a lot of fun and participating in sports provided me with lifelong lessons in leadership, teamwork, setting goals, and how to stay healthy through physical activity. The benefits of sports often made me wonder why many of my peers stayed on the sidelines, never participating in the leagues that I saw as a natural, healthy part of childhood.

Sports is a fun way for children to exercise and I often ask parents and caregivers in the community whether their children are participating in sports activities. Sadly, more and more parents are telling me that their children want to participate in sports, but they cannot. The reason? No health insurance.

Without health insurance, children cannot join a soccer team or play in Little League. More importantly, parents and caregivers are worried that allowing their children to play sports may include a financial risk for out-of-pocket costs for an emergency room visit, hospitalization, and prescription medications, all of which the parents cannot afford. For too many parents, the loss of a job and the health coverage that came with it means foregoing health insurance for their children.

Children with health insurance are more likely to get immunizations, have a regular doctor, and receive preventative care. They are much less likely to end up in the emergency room for minor issues and acute care. And, according to a recent University of Southern California study, insured children do better in school.

Long before the current economic downturn, communities all over California started working to increase access to subsidized health insurance for low-income children. Here in Sonoma County, for example, a concerned group of community leaders started Healthy Kids Sonoma County to improve access to health care in 2005. Their vision—that every child deserves to be a healthy child—became the foundation for developing a program to solve a local problem with local solutions and resources. Since its inception, Healthy Kids Sonoma County has nearly doubled the number of low-income children with subsidized health insurance in our community. Thanks to Healthy Kids, Sonoma County has fewer uninsured children today than it did before the economic downturn began.

Today, Healthy Kids and similar programs, under the umbrella of California Children’s Health Initiatives in many counties across the state, continue to strive to fulfill the promise that every child will be able to receive quality, preventative health care. According to the latest estimates, there are 1.5 million children who lack health insurance in California. In order to sprint towards our goal, we must make children our first priority at the county, state, and federal levels.

No parent should have to choose between paying the rent and providing health care for his or her child. No child should have to sit on the sidelines because his or her family cannot afford health coverage. I care about healthy kids because I want every child to have what I had: a healthy active childhood that leads to a healthy future.

We can all support Sonoma County’s Healthy Kids initiative through donations, corporate sponsorships, and by lobbying local, state, and federal lawmakers to continue to support vital children’s programs such as this. The generosity and tenacity of local community members is more crucial than ever now to ensure that children’s health initiatives remain successful statewide, in spite of the belt-tightening political atmosphere and environment in Sacramento and Washington.