... And access for all?

• Author: Miller, Ray
• Position: Providing health care for minority children - Opinion

Whenever we talk about children, we are talking about the future of our nation. And when we focus on the health of minority children, we cannot help but focus on the major causes of racial inequity and deprivation in this country: discrimination, education and poverty.

When we address the subject of health care, we talk about availability, affordability and accessibility All three are denied, or significantly reduced, when one is poor. Poverty has everything to do with poor health care.

Think about our own middle-class children. Why are they healthy? The answer is quite simple--because we can afford for them to be. They do not have to languish in crowded emergency rooms for primary care. If they need hearing aids and glasses, we can afford them. They receive proper dental care. They have health insurance, not Medicaid, which would relegate them to some degree of reduced medical care. And before they were born their mothers had prenatal care.

Unfortunately, the same set of circumstances is not true for the 10 million children under the age of 18 in this country who have no health insurance. This fact angers me. I hope it angers every state legislator in every state. We should be outraged and ashamed for allowing such conditions to persist. Even if we are insensitive to the human suffering, we should be intelligent enough to understand the cost-effectiveness of providing the optimum level of health care for all children in this country.

What can states do to bring about some type of meaningful change?

First of all, it is past time that the president of the United States and Congress get together to enact a law, that guarantees that quality health care be provided to all citizens of this country, regardless of their ability to pay. I recommend that state legislators aggressively lobby the president and the Congress to enact a national system of health care.

Second, we need to coordinate a plan of attack on the issue of child health care, with quantifiable goals and objectives. We cannot continue to fund programs without measuring them, without asking "What kind of progress have we made?"

We talk about health care goals at the national level for the year 2000. But we also need health care goals in our respective states.

Ohio was the first state to establish a commission on minority health--a separate agency that has its own autonomy. We did not want it to be tied up in health, human services or some other state agency. It has a budget of $3.4...