LAKE COUNTY — Results from a Children Now survey that gauge the health of youth in Lake County may not aptly take into consideration the large numbers of children without health coverage that cannot be reached by phone.
The data, released to the county Superintendent of Schools and some local agencies to use in determining where county health policy should focus ranked children under the age of 18 in Lake County as being 95 percent insured, a number Gloria Flaherty of the Lake Family Resource Center said was “idealistic.”
That percentage doesn”t make sense, according to Flaherty, especially considering the high poverty levels the same survey reports for the county. For children living in low-income households, the survey ranked Lake County 46 out of 58 counties in California, with one being the best and 58 the worst. Children living in poverty in the county ranked 31 percent, while the statewide ranking is 19 percent.
According to Flaherty and other agency officials, the survey could be skipping a lot of children in the community – homeless, runaways, or throwaway youth, those without telephones, and the thousands of others who are not contacted for the survey.
The data used in Children Now”s report card is compiled via a random dial telephone sample from the CA Health Interview Survey (CHIS) conducted by UCLA.
“They definitely make every effort they can to have an accurate representation,” said Children Now spokesperson Corey Newhouse. CHIS methodologist Sung-Hee Lee said that the confidence interval ranges from 89-100 percent, meaning that is the range of what the actual percentage could be, based on population, with a 5 percent chance that number is incorrect. “After the first random digit dial, we do an additional dial that targets particular communities,” said Lee.
That 5 percent chance of being incorrect may be the case with this survey, according to officials at LFRC. “In the last 18 months we”ve assisted 458 children into Healthy Families and Medi-cal programs, and that”s just one half-time person who is working at that job. So that indicates there are still a lot of children left to cover,” said Flaherty.
According to Lake County Department of Social Services” Patricia Shuman, 7,138 children in Lake County have received Medi-cal assistance, including cash aid, as of May 2007.
These numbers don”t include children who do not qualify for Medi-Cal, but who go without insurance because their parents cannot afford a premium. To secure grants to help cover children, LFRC uses the most recent statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau – and those are seven years old.
The U.S. Census Bureau reports that for children under 18 in Lake County, there were 12,394 who were insured, with 15.9 percent of children uninsured.
“And the Census Bureau doesn”t count everybody. It doesn”t count undocumented children for one thing,” said Flaherty, adding that the Healthy Families program does enroll undocumented children.
What”s interesting, Flaherty said, is that the same U.S. Census report stated that 19.3 percent of all ages are uninsured in the county, which reflects the large number of adults who are uninsured. “When the parents are uninsured, it”s less likely the kids are,” said Flaherty.
Newhouse admits this information raises red flags, “Certainly we know that rates for adults are pretty atrocious. The survey could be off because it is relying on what parents tell people, and that may be different from what”s really there. If Medi-Cal is saying only 7,000 are enrolled out of 15,000, then there”s a gap that raises questions,” said Newhouse.
Maxwell says that at an upcoming Covering Kids and Families Coalition meeting in Sacramento – a statewide umbrella group that includes the Department of Social Services, Healthy Families, and Medi-Cal – they will try again to determine on-target insurance enrollment numbers. “It is a challenge getting those numbers, but they would be useful for everybody I”m here watching the applications come in every day based on what I”m seeing, there is a huge discrepancy in numbers,” said Maxwell.
Contact Elizabeth Wilson at ewilson@record-bee.com.
