Healthy Ties: Ensuring Health Coverage for Children Raised by Grandparents and Other Relatives

The Children's Defense Fund (CDF) believes that all children deserve a healthy start in life to help secure their happiness, well-being, and successful passage into adulthood. To make this goal an everyday reality, children need affordable, high quality health insurance to cover the rising costs of medical care. Tragically, too many children go without the health coverage they so desperately need. Today in the United States,10.8 million children ages 18 and under do not have health insurance despite the fact that nine out of 10 of these uninsured children live in families with at least one parent who works. Either these parents cannot afford the cost of family coverage through work ,or they represent the 25 percent of the workforce that cannot obtain any family coverage through their employers.Without health insurance and the care it ensures, children suffer needlessly from untreated health problems and preventable illnesses. Conditions that could be eliminated through early diagnosis and treatment can become lifelong health problems, making it difficult for children to keep up in school, sustain healthy relationships, and stay hopeful about the future.