It’s becoming a familiar scene across Texas: a parent brings her child to the doctor for a checkup. She signs in at the front desk. Only then does she learn that her child has been kicked off her health insurance—a casualty of missing paperwork and hoops she didn’t know existed. Next comes the awful decision: Pay out of pocket or delay the appointment, skipping critical care like vaccinations against measles, which is seeing a resurgence in Texas and around the country.
Tamisha Jones, a Harris County pediatrician, estimates that this happens several times a week at Legacy Community Health in Houston, where she sees primarily Medicaid patients. Each time, it’s “heartbreaking” for parents and dangerous for kids. “The sad part is that it typically happens right around that one-year mark, when there’s a need to come in and get screened for things like anemia, lead poisoning, and get a slew of vaccines,” Jones says. “Each day [a child’s] not protected is another day that [that child is] at risk.”
Jones works in the county with the most uninsured kids in the nation—166,000—in the state with the most uninsured kids—873,000. Eleven percent of Texas kids were uninsured in 2018, more than double the national rate. And the numbers are getting worse. A recent report from Georgetown University found that the rate of uninsured kids nationwide increased for a second consecutive year in 2018, after several years of decline that were due at least in part to the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
