Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, February 21, 1992 TAG: 9202210486
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
OLIN'S BILL
HEALTH CARE is political Topic A. Several measures have been introduced in Congress to broaden coverage, and others are on the way. Sixth District Rep. Jim Olin offered a bill this week that would pay for free national health care for pregnant women and for children under 7.Because its scope is more limited and its targets more specific, he thinks his plan might pass before others. It would be expensive - an estimated $46 billion, to be paid largely by increases in corporate and personal tax rates - but less so than the more comprehensive measures. Less costly, too, than the status-quo alternative of spotty and uncertain care for mothers and the very young.
Statistically, it's dangerous to be born into the United States. Our infant mortality rate is higher than that of 19 other industrial nations. An American child is almost twice as likely as an elderly person to be poor, and 27 children die every day as a result of poverty, says the Children's Defense Fund.
Poverty and ill health are close companions. The Census Bureau estimates nearly 40 percent of American children (including 200,000 in Virginia) have little or no health insurance. Neither, of course, do their mothers, many of whom are single and working. (Children don't vote, and poor adults have little political clout.)
It's a national disgrace, and it poses genuine peril for a country fond of saying that the children are our future. They need better food, shelter and nurture too, but programs to promote day care, nutrition and the like are stinted. As for health care, most of it goes to the old.
Something like Olin's bill needs to be enacted. Better yet would be a plan to insure comprehensive national health care, stressing prevention of illness, for everyone of all ages.