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San Jose
Mercury News Editorial It's the Silicon Valley version of passing the hat: Send an e-mail to co-workers telling them about a worthy cause, and include the Web address where they can donate online. Stanley Huang made a pitch to his fellow employees at Sun Microsystems and generated thousands of dollars to provide health insurance to needy kids. If his effort can be replicated, it will help Santa Clara County become the first place in America where every single child is insured. The Sun employees donated to the Children's Health Initiative, which is a partnership of local government, non-profits and corporations that signed up 24,000 kids in the county for various health insurance programs. Sun agreed to match their gifts. Health insurance may not seem like a cause people naturally rally behind -- like helping Sept. 11 orphans or finding a cure for cancer. But kids need to be healthy to learn and grow into productive adults. What could be more important to the future of the valley? The Children's Health Initiative estimates that 71,000 kids in this county are uninsured, and that 51,000 of them are eligible for Medi-Cal or the state's Healthy Families programs. The other 20,000 have parents who make too much money to qualify for government insurance but not enough to afford private health care plans. The Initiative signs up as many children as it can under Medi-Cal or Healthy Families, and covers the rest through Healthy Kids, a new program run by the Santa Clara Family Health Foundation. Most of the $16 million the Children's Health Initiative needs comes from government, foundations, corporations and major individual donors. But its leaders are counting on at least $500,000 a year in small pledges from regular folks. Craig Walsh, who runs the fundraising effort, is hoping employees at other companies will follow Sun's lead by logging on to www.healthykidsfund.org and contributing -- and then persuading their employers to match their gifts. "We're a real small foundation, taking on this daunting task,'' Walsh said. "The nice thing is that we have the support of the whole community.''
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