Health Insurance For Children Should Be A Priority, Poll Concludes

Voters strongly support expanded health care coverage for children, according to two national polls released Thursday.

Lawmakers in both parties have been discussing ways to provide greater coverage to children, but have not agreed on which children should be guaranteed coverage or how to finance it.

Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle, D-S.D., has indicated support for a $5 billion to $10 billion program to provide health insurance to all uninsured children. Republicans have said they will wait for President Bill Clinton to take the lead either in his inaugural address next week or his budget next month.

Recent surveys show there are about 10 million to 12 million uninsured children in the United States, 70 percent of whom are in families where at least one adult works.

In separate polls released Thursday by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Coalition for America’s Children, there is strong support for incremental health care reforms addressing children’s coverage.

“Beginning with children is just the hands-down winner,” said Drew Altman, president of the Kaiser foundation, which conducted a survey with Harvard University of 1,000 people who voted in the 1996 election.

The survey, done in the days immediately after the election, found that 52 percent of voters believe the first incremental health coverage reform should focus on children, compared with 19 percent who said it should focus on uninsured workers, 12 percent on long-term care and 11 percent on the poor.

Nearly three-fourths of voters said they would be willing to pay an extra $25 a year in new taxes to create a program to provide health insurance to every child, according to a survey of 800 voters conducted in December by the bipartisan polling team of Lake Research and the Tarrance(CQ) Group for the Coalition for America’s Children.

Asked who should be responsible for helping parents obtain health insurance for their children, a plurality of voters - 43 percent - said either the federal or local governments, while 22 percent said employers.

But voters are ambivalent about the best way of financing health coverage for children.

In the coalition’s study, 18 percent favored a Medicare-like federal program to cover all children; 15 percent favored tax breaks for parents who insure their children; 14 percent support requiring insurers to offer low-cost children-only policies and 12 percent favor government vouchers for low-income families.