New Mexico Voices for Children Core Value: Healthy Communities

Issue Areas:
Health Care
Education
Child Safety

A healthy community is one in which children and their parents have access to affordable health care, including preventive care, where children receive quality education that begins before elementary school, and children are safe from harm. In a health community, everyone is invested and involved, and neighbors work together to discourage crime and drug use.

Health Care
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Our communities cannot be healthy if our children and their families are not healthy. Unfortunately, access to health care is not considered a right in this country, but a privilege. While all other developed nations guarantee their citizens access to health care, in the U.S. such access is treated as a commodity.

Families that do not have employer-based health insurance either rely on Medicaid or they end up using hospital emergency rooms as their primary care providers. When the only doctor they see is in the E.R. families get little or no preventative care. This not only makes health care more expensive for everyone, but it costs the nation in terms of an increased spread of contagious illness, and lost work productivity and time in school.

This also means that we have a whole sub-class of citizens—nearly a quarter of all New Mexicans—whose quality of life is compromised on every level because they do not have health insurance. Not only do the uninsured pay medical expenses out-of-pocket, but they are also charged higher rates because they lack the bargaining power of large insurance corporations. More than 80,000 children in New Mexico do not have health insurance. Of those children that have health insurance, 40 percent receive it through Medicaid—the health insurance program for low-income children, disabled and elderly.

But recent federal and state tax cuts have led to a decrease in Medicaid funding. On top of that, the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 limited the kinds of documents that are acceptable when applying for Medicaid or recertifying. The amendment was meant to keep undocumented immigrants from receiving Medicaid benefits—even though the U.S. Health and Human Services Department had already determined that very little, if any, of that sort of fraud was going on. In the 2004 legislative session, our state's policy makers reduced funding for Medicaid. As a result, thousands of children have lost their health care coverage and for the first time in years, Medicaid enrollment dropped, while the number of uninsured children increased. The 2005 legislature failed to restore enough funding to reverse this trend, but in 2006, we won a major battle when we got the state Legislature to fully fund Medicaid.

Medicaid is good medicine for New Mexico's economy. For every dollar the state spends on Medicaid, we receive $3 from the federal government—tripling our initial investment every year. A $1 million investment of state dollars generates an additional $3 million federal match and creates 80 jobs across the state—many in rural areas. Reduced spending on health weakens the infrastructure that enables businesses to function. Children and adults who are healthy miss less school and less work.

Policy Priorities:

• Guaranteed health care for everyone. Europe has proven that it's not only possible, but it can be far better and less expensive than our health-care system. Nor does universal health care have to be the government-run single-payer systems of Canada and England. Since Congress is unwilling to take on this issue, it is incumbent for the state of New Mexico to do so.
• Full funding for Medicaid and no additional cuts in eligibility or benefit levels.
• Provide funding to mandate continuous Medicaid enrollment for all eligible newborn babies until the child's second birthday. Such a policy would assure that the child gets off to a healthy start and has all immunizations, screenings and well-baby checkups.
  
• Expand Medicaid eligibility to the low-income parents of eligible children (whose income is less than the federal poverty threshold). Studies show that children's access to health care is greatly improved when their parents are insured.
  
• Expand the number of school-based health centers (SBHCs), particularly in rural areas of the state, and grant them adequate funding. Children don't learn when they are at home sick and they are more likely to access health care when it is in a familiar setting. Parents do not lose any authority over their child's health care and don't have to take time off from work so their children can see a doctor.
  
• Maintain the current level of funding for tobacco prevention initiatives for young people. Our investment in tobacco prevention is producing results, saving health care dollars, and should be maintained at current levels. No new money required.
  
• Increase the tax on smokeless tobacco. Tobacco taxes were increased years ago, but chewing tobacco was exempted. This tax would be added to smokeless tobacco products only. The tax would help to deter use by young people and raise revenues for medical care for those harmed by using tobacco products.

Policies We Oppose:

• The criminalization of tobacco use by underage youth. While Voices acknowledges that young people should not be using tobacco products, we do not believe that criminalizing children is an effective or appropriate action.

Education
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An investment in early childhood development pays off. Children who participate in quality early childhood education show better academic performance all through school and higher earnings as adults. Read our most recent report on the payoff associated with quality early childhood education programs, Improving Infant and Toddler Education and Care in New Mexico.

Policy Priorities:

• Invest in quality early childcare and education—which could include a complete phase-in of a new universal, voluntary pre-kindergarten program for four-year-olds.
  
• Expand the pilot project for home visiting in Luna County, which provides voluntary home visits by a nurse for first-time parents until their newborn is one, has proven very successful. Such home visiting programs provide huge cost savings in health care and education.
  
• Increase support for out-of-school programs such as service learning and community volunteerism, to provide greater opportunities for young people.
  

Child Safety
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Policy Priorities:

• Require gun manufacturers to put safety locks on all firearms. While no one thinks twice about buckling children into car safety seats, we fail our children by not requiring this simple, but effective, safety measure.
  
• Allow families to sue for damages when a child is injured or killed with a gun and the manufacturer is found to be negligent. Gun makers and sellers currently have legal immunity—even when they are found to be negligent. No other industry is provided this kind of legal immunity, why should the gun industry?

Policies We Oppose:

• Expanding the scope of law and allow more people to carry concealed weapons in more places.
• Youth curfew laws. While curfew laws are purported to be for the safety of children, studies indicate that children are most in harm's way in the after-school hours, not from midnight to 5am. Curfew laws do not protect children. Curfew laws perpetuate negative images of young people as troublemakers.