Story originally printed in the La Crosse Tribune or online at www.lacrossetribune.com
Published - Wednesday, May 07, 2008
Provide more health insurance
Last week was Cover the Uninsured Week, a national effort that seeks to bring attention to the fact that too many Americans are living without health insurance.
Statistics show that 47 million Americans, including more than 9 million children, lack health care coverage. State programs have been created in an attempt to reduce the amount of uninsured. One such program is S-CHIP, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program created in 1997 to cover children whose families earn too much money to qualify for Medicaid but too little to purchase private health insurance.
Another program is BadgerCare, which serves the state of Wisconsin by providing health care to children under the age of 19 and their families regardless of income.
In addition to these, Medicare and Medicaid are national assistance programs. Medicare is designed to assist people age 65 and older and Medicaid assists the low-income and disabled.
Still, as a country the United States falls short of other countries. In 2003, the United States spent 15 percent of its gross domestic product on health care, the highest percentage of industrialized countries.
More needs to be done to bring about a solution to this issue. The best way to do this is to increase awareness about the issue by becoming involved with more information about Cover the Uninsured Week and how to get involved can be found on our Web page at www.geocities.com/missingpieces08.
The creators of the Web page are students at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse participating in a United States Health Care course.
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