Investing in children is an investment in the future

In a conference call today, the Commonwealth Fund discussed a new report which ranks all 50 states and the District of Colombia on key measures of how each state’s health care systems are working for children. The report, to be released tomorrow, assesses states on 13 measures on their health care, quality care, health care costs, health care equity and the potential to lead long healthy lives.

The Commonwealth Fund is a private foundation that supports independent issues on health care research, and try to get proper information to policy makers to make policy decisions according to the needs of the people. Unlike adult health care, children’s health care relies heavily on federal and states funding not private insurance. According to the report Michigan has the lowest amount of uninsured children at five percent, whereas Texas has 20 percent of uninsured children. Edward Schor, vice president for child development and preventative care at the Commonwealth Fund, said that if every state had only five percent of children uninsured, there wold be 4.6 million more insured children cutting the amount of uninsured children in half.

The main purpose of the report, according to Karen David, president of the Commonwealth Fund, is to help individual states better their health policies for children. States can learn from each other and should model their own policies after successful states, because investing in children’s health is an investment in the future, said Schor.

There is a wide variation across the states, and the report is intended to bring attention to high performance, not as an ideal of what would be desirable but to show what is feasible and what has been achieved by others, said David. In general the south ranked poorly, and Iowa and Vermont led in overall performance. More information and a state by state ranking can be seen at www.commonwealthfund.org.