What the national healthcare argument means for our kids

**This is also found at Children's Health Blog, where I am a contributing author.**

So, everyone wants to talk about nationalized healthcare. Presidential candidates, Congress, Conservatives and Liberals. There are just massive amounts of communication on the issue. You hear about it from pundits on cable news channels, listen to answers (and half-answers) about it from candidates, read polls on it in newspapers and countless blogs like this one discuss all aspects of the issue. Except one.

The one item is quality of the care. Whether any citizen is able to get private care, or publicly funded medical coverage or any other solution that may be proposed the real issue is how good the quality of the care they receive is. This is no more critical than when the quality of care given to children is concerned.

I want to thank Dr. Risa Lavizzo-Mourey for the article she wrote on a recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine. The study was based on 1500 children, and conducted by Children's Hospital and Regional Medical Center in Seattle, the University of Washington School of Medicine and the RAND Corporation, with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Roughly 80% of the children had private medical coverage and nearly all had some form of coverage.

What the study found was shocking. 46% of the care that the kids should have gotten never happened. While treatment for something like the common was mostly appropriate, but for asthma and other chronic ailments it was half as effective. Let me be clear, out of 175 items that should be part of child care – including the diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up – many items were never done. And this is among children that had the money.

Imagine that. Your kids are not getting the treatment they need, and politicians are arguing over how to pay for what they aren’t being given in the first place. The priorities seem to be fundamentally flawed. The question that should be asked appears to be why is the quality of care as low for children in a nation with as many resources and experts as America does?

No matter the political affiliation, I believe that everyone loves children. None would wish them harm and want only the best for them. Yet political bickering is oblivious to this issue, stuck in a quagmire of how to pay. I am not a parent but I am sure that every parent I know hasn’t a single care about cost when their child is sick. If you gave them a million dollars and stated their child would remain ill, or have lifelong complications from failing to get the right treatment, the parent might throttle you for such a suggestion. Yet that is the political environment today.

I am insulted to learn this information and to hear of this lapse. This is America, a land where the best of everything exists and the standards in virtually every aspect of life are the envy of every nation in the world. Yet our children lag far behind. Not behind our potential, but behind our actual ability to provide care. That is an insult, our children deserve more.