Kids Have Rights Action Center

As reported by The Palm Beach Post: Most of Florida’s major health insurers have stopped writing new “child-only” insurance policies, and  some of them pulled out of the market just days before new federal health-care provisions required insurers to provide full coverage to kids with pre-existing conditions.

In Florida, the insurers  include Cigna, Humana, Aetna, United Healthcare and Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Florida. All have stopped writing any new policies for children-only. Here’s a link to the Post’s story.

Restating the obvious? Whatever, let’s take nothing away from the Fort Meyers News-Press, who has an excellent multimedia presentation about poverty and challenges in Southwest Florida. Check out the story and features here.

Florida has received more than $5.7 million in Federal $’s for increasing foster care kid adoptions, despite a drop in the past year. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said Wednesday that Florida was one of 39 states rewarded for boosting numbers of adoptions since 2007. The states use the incentive money to improve their child welfare programs.

Read a bit more in the Miami Herald article here: http://ht.ly/2Hqgj

In an article sure spark a firestorm of debate, the Orlando Sentinel reports in this story on an article by L.A. Times writer Karen Kaplan. According to a group of child health specialists from England and Ireland, children who are obese and therefore at risk of developing lifelong complications should be removed from their homes.

If parents fail to provide medical treatment for a child with a chronic disease like asthma or epilepsy, government welfare officials can put the young patient in foster care. Should they do the same for children who are obese — and therefore at risk of developing lifelong complications such as heart disease and type 2 diabetes?

“Childhood obesity can be seen as a failure to adequately care for your children by failing to provide a healthy diet and sufficient activity, whether through direct neglect or more subtly through an inability to deny children the pleasures of energy dense fast food and television viewing,” the experts write in a paper published online here by the British Medical Journal.

The first-ever gubernatorial debate to focus solely on the future of Florida’s children will be held next month at the University of Miami and organizers expect both Democrat Alex Sink and Republican Rick Scott to participate.

Working as partners with UM, the Children’s Movement of Florida said Wednesday it will host the October 16th debate, which will be broadcast statewide on television and on the Internet.

The Washington Post reports that the number of children being raised by their grandparents has risen sharply since the start of the recession in 2007, according to a new Pew Research Center study that found one in 10 children in the U.S. now lives with a grandparent. That’s 2.9 million children. You can read details of the story here.