Children's Health Initiative - CHI Newspaper Articles

San Francisco Chronicle
The Peninsula and the Bay Area
March 10, 2001

Uninsured children about to be covered
Santa Clara County pioneers 'Healthy Kids'

By Alan Gathright
Chronicle Staff Writer

Supporters compare Santa Clara County's groundbreaking program providing universal child health insurance to a precocious toddler.

The county won't officially initiate an outreach campaign to sign up Silicon Valley's estimated 70,000 uninsured children until Sunday, but eager parents of 5,000 children already have applied for the Children's Health Initiative.

The first program of its kind in the nation, Healthy Kids will provide comprehensive medical, dental and vision care to any child under age 19 for families that fall between the cracks of subsidized state and federal health care programs.

For example, now families whose income is three times the federal poverty level -- $51,000 for a family of four -- can qualify. The program also will cover undocumented immigrant children who aren't eligible for other government insurance.

Yesterday, labor leader Marion Steeg said the nine-month campaign by religious congregations and unions to get elected leaders to back the Healthy Kids program was "a very long and difficult labor.

"And we've given birth to this wonderful child. This is a very fast-growing child . . . that is already crawling and will start running on Sunday," Steeg, staff director of the South Bay Labor Council, said at a San Jose news conference to kick off the outreach campaign.

Health officials and grassroots groups from San Francisco to San Diego are planning to replicate the $14 million-a-year South Bay program. It relies largely on the tobacco industry's lawsuit settlement and tobacco taxes to provide insurance for children whose parents make too much money to qualify for other state and federal health care programs for the poor.

"We've had calls from all around Bay Area -- San Francisco, Alameda, Contra Costa and Sonoma," Steeg said. "And we've talked to people in San Joaquin and Kern counties."

The Rev. Rex Police, a minister with the San Diego Organizing Project, an alliance of faith-based groups, said his group has united with labor unions to intensively lobby elected officials to follow Santa Clara County's lead.

The minister told how his grandson was born with a hole in his heart. Doctors said the baby was doomed to die. He languished in the hospital for weeks because his mother's insurance lapsed during her maternity leave.

Finally, surgeons agreed to operate after the infant's grandmother slept with him in the hospital for weeks, vowing: "I'm staying in this hospital until you operate on my grandson." The boy is now a healthy, active 3 year old.

"That kind of thing should not be when a working family can't get health care," Police said. "We believe the Children's Health Initiative is a model that must be replicated across the state of California."

Assemblyman Manny Diaz, D-San Jose, said he has introduced legislation to do just that. AB 495 would provide matching state funds to communities that provide health care coverage to uninsured children.

Healthy Kids also is a model for the grassroots power of groups like People Acting in Community Together (PACT), an alliance of 15 San Jose congregations and over 30,000 families. The alliance lobbied elected officials for nearly a year. Although the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors soon endorsed the project, San Jose Mayor Ron Gonzales initially balked at spending $2 million from the city's $10 million tobacco settlement on the project.

But national press attention on the pioneering effort, snowballing community support, and relentless lobbying by PACT members spurred the San Jose City Council in December to contribute $3.16 million over three years.

"PACT sees access to health care as a basic human rights issue," said Maritza Calvillo, the group's co-chairperson. "Kids who are uninsured really underscores the economic disparity in Silicon Valley, which produces 70,000 new millionaires a year. We said, 'Wait a minute, there's something wrong here. ' "

"We're celebrating this victory because people of faith from around San Jose organized themselves powerfully and demanded a response from their elected officials," she told a cheering crowd yesterday.

For Irma Perez, the mother of two young daughters, the program means she won't have to worry about what she will do when her girls get sick. Two months ago, her husband had to pay "a very, very expensive" dental bill out-of-pocket when their oldest daughter got two infected teeth after going three years without a checkup.

"On Sunday, at this (registration) event, for the first time my children will have health insurance," she said. "The first thing I'm going to use is dental insurance."

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