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Katrina's Children A Call to Action In our new Children’s Defense Fund report Katrina’s Children: A Call to Conscience and Action, CDF documents the crisis facing thousands of young people who survived the storm only to still find themselves facing an uncertain future over seven months later. We are letting them down. This is not a time for business as usual, compassion fatigue, or moving on to the next “story of the day.” This is also not a time for corrupt or self serving leadership political, corporate, educational, professional, or nonprofit that hurts children and betrays public trust. What kind of leaders ask poor children to sacrifice already inadequate child health and mental health care, education, child care, Head Start, and after school programs to subsidize $1.9 trillion in tax cuts which mostly benefit the wealthiest and most powerful people and special interests? What kind of citizens and people of faith permit this travesty? If ever there was a time of irresponsible disregard for children and the poor and for justice for all, it is now. And if ever there was a clear case study for why our rich nation should not dilly dally another moment to adopt a coherent national health and mental health system for its people beginning this year with children it is Katrina’s catastrophe, with children and survivors of all ages scattered across our land, facing 50 state bureaucracies without medical records. Some states like Texas actually have cut back child health coverage and benefits for hundreds of thousands of children. Others, like Mississippi, have callously made it harder rather than easier for children and families eligible for Medicaid and CHIP health benefits to get them by reimposing face to face eligibility requirements and shorter eligibility time periods. These costly and stressful bureaucratic obstacles will cause many poor people who lack transportation and awareness of changed policies and are already living on the edge in strange places to lose health and mental health care. Current national political rhetoric and tax and budget choices tell us that the rich should be pampered and the poor plundered. The $1.9 trillion in tax cuts, when fully in effect, will give the richest one percent of all tax payers $57 billion each year. This is enough to provide health coverage to all 9 million uninsured children or enough to end child poverty in America now. Current national rhetoric and priorities also tell us “our own might is our God.” President Bush’s 2007 military budget seeks $527.4 billion a year; $44 billion a month; $10.1 billion a week; $1.4 billion a day; and $60 million an hour. Just one month’s military expenditure is more than twice as much as is needed to provide all 9 million uninsured children health coverage. The President’s military budget includes more than $10.4 billion for Star Wars—the unproved (and not yet operational) Missile Defense System. That is enough money to lift 2.6 million children from poverty every single poor child in four hurricane affected states: Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Texas. It is time for a new civil rights movement to reset America’s moral and social compass and to restore hope, stability and a sense of future to Katrina’s children and all children in our lost nation. Katrina’s children face specific emergency mental health, health and education needs right now, but they and all children need their families, communities and leaders to ensure them a healthy and safe foundation in the early years and a chance to reach productive self sufficient adulthood. They need families able to work at living wages with health care. They need good schools. They need equitable, quality integrated systems of care that prepare them for the future. Katrina’s children are America’s opportunity once again to hear and heed God’s call to protect the poor, the orphan, the widow, and the vulnerable. Children are the transforming agents in our fractured nation and world. Dare we longer mistreat, neglect, abuse, kill, and deny health care to a single one of them? Dare we value one over another or hold babies and children responsible for unwise adult choices over which children had no control? Dare the richest nation on earth blessed to be a blessing continue its unjust playing field for children and wantonly continue to widen the gap between the have and have nots? How will you use your voice, vote, and organizational, professional and personal time to build the transforming movement our children need to live and learn and thrive and embrace the future with hope? [For a copy of CDF’s report Katrina’s Children: A Call to Conscience and Action, visit https://mail.childrensdefense.org/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.childrensdefense.org/.] |
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