The
Star-Ledger
Tuesday, March 31, 1999
Removing insurance as barrier to vaccines
Child advocate focuses on cost and access
By Angela Stewart
STAR-LEDGER STAFF
 |
Marian Wright Edelman (r.) with
Gateway Maternal and Child Health Consortium Director Marijane Lundt and Gateway's Board of Directors President Morris Cohen, MD O God of All Children, a prayer from Ms. Edelman's book "Guide My Feet" |
The country's leading child advocate yesterday
urged participants at an immunization conference in Newark to work diligently
to remove insurance concerns as a barrier to protecting children from getting
a "healthy start" in life.
Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the
Children's Defense Fund, said there are more than 11 million uninsured children
in America, about 331,000 of them in New Jersey. While programs like NJ
KidCare are making inroads in identifying and providing coverage to children
previously uninsured, Edelman said such programs still need to be made more
"family friendly" so that more people will access them.
According to Edelman, about 27,000 New Jersey
children have been enrolled in KidCare, which is state and federally funded,
but she said the number is probably not higher because the application process
is too cumbersome and that many working families tend to associate it with
welfare. The program is free to poor working families, like a family of
four earning less than $24,675, and charges low premiums for families who
earn more.
"We have a long way to go," Edelman
told an audience gathered for the day-long conference held at the Newark
Museum. "We cannot leave any child behind."
Edelman urged New Jersey officials to simplify
the application process and get out into the community and let people know
what KidCare is all about. She praised a new ad campaign that the state
has launched to help demystify the program.
Edelman was the keynote speaker for "Creating
Partnerships for the New Millenium: Meeting the Challenges of Immunizing
Our Children," which was billed as the first major immunization conference
ever held in New Jersey.
The event was sponsored by the Gateway
Maternal and Child Health Consortium in conjunction
with the State Department of Health and Senior Services, the Academy of
Medicine of New Jersey and National Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
New Jersey's statewide average immunization
rate for children under the age of 2 is now about 80 percent, up from 50
percent in 1992. But officials have set a goal of 90 percent by the year
2000, said Jim Blumenstock, senior assistant commissioner for the state
health department.
He said the state has even applied to the
CDC to have a Public Health Prevention Specialist assigned to New Jersey
on a temporary basis to help with the immunization effort.
"It is one of the department's highest
priorities," he said.
Newark's immunization rate is only 72 percent.
Catherine Cuomo-Cecere, director of the city's
Department of Health and Human Services, said the key to gettign more children
immunized will be forming partnerships with doctors and community-based
organizations.
A grass-roots effort known as the Newark Immunizatin
Initiative was founded last year to increase the number of children being
immunized in the state's largest city, which two years ago had an immunization
coverage rate of only 63 percent.
"We have to work harder to educate people
about the problem," Cuomo-Cecere said.
Dr. Cynthia Paige, assistant professor of
clinical family medicine at the UMDNJ-New Jersey Medical School, has found
that many parents just don't know when their children should be immunized
or what vaccines they should be getting. Competing demands of holding down
a job or going to school can also interfere with trying to keep up with
the vaccine schedule, she said.
Add to that the fact that there are new vaccines
like Rotavirus, which is designed to attack severe diarrhea in children
and infants -- and a new vaccine schedule for polio, and things can seem
pretty overwhelming, she said.
"Once they come in and you recommend
the vaccine, though, most of the parents will go along with your recommendation,"
she said.
CDC offficials, however, have expressed concern
about an increasing "anti-vaccine movement," which has linked
vaccines like hepatitis B to diseased such as multiple sclerosis.
Dr. Walker Orenstein, director of the CDC's
National Immunization Program, said Web sites highlighting adverse reactions
to vaccines are putting unwarranted fear in parents, when the overall safety
rate and effectiveness of vaccines in eradicating diseases is substantial.
In 1990, he said there were almost 28,000
cases of measles reported to the CDC, while today there are fewer than 100,
making fo an all-time low. "The benefits of vaccines far outweigh the
risks," he said.
For more information, call the CDC immunization hotline, 1-800-232-2522
(English) or 1-800-232-0233 (Spanish).
Marian Wright Edelman ended her address to the conference with her prayer
"O God of All Children"
from her book entitled
"Guide My Feet"