Orlando Sentinel
April 12, 2004
Editorial
What are they thinking?
As the state Senate and House go into conference to ruminate on the budget, here’s something they should keep in mind:
One of the dumbest things the Senate did was slash health-insurance coverage for 7,000 low-income pregnant women.
Even those who think adults should be responsible for themselves surely care about the babies. Prenatal care helps to prevent pre-term, low-weight births; among babies born before 32 weeks of pregnancy, one in five will die in the first year of life.
It took years of effort for Florida to cut its newborn death rate to the national average. In the nineties — when Florida began to get serious about giving low-income women prenatal care — the percentage of births without prenatal care was cut in half.
If statistics make senators’ eyes glaze over, they might do well to think of their proposed cut as an increase in the number of infant-sized coffins.
Comment: Even the coffin industry surely would prefer public policies that would reduce infant coffin sales now, replacing them with deferred sales of more lucrative adult-sized coffins.
We’re spending $1.79 trillion on health care this year. That’s more then enough to pay not only for prenatal care, but for all necessary care for everyone. Our policymakers need to redirect their efforts and start planning for an affordable system of universal health care coverage. We can show them the policies that they would need to adopt in order to establish a compassionate health care system for all. But we have to work harder on delivering that message.
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