Expanding Health Insurance Coverage for Uninsured Children: The Next Step in Health Care Reform?

hensive look at many of the health policy issues related to children 3- health insurance. It was originally written in April 1997 when the outcome of foderallegislation was unclear. Even though Congress has recently decided to increase health insurance coverage for children, how-ever, the issues presented in this paper remain critically important. Because this new legislation is expected to provide coverage for fewer than one quarter of the cur-rently uninsured children, it is likely that Congress will revisit these same issues again in the near future. In The demise of President Clinton's 1993 proposal for a major overhaul of the US health care system and the failure of congressional alternatives to the Clinton plan have led to subsequent calls for an incremental approach to health care reform. The so-called Kassebaum-Kennedy bill enacted last year took such an approach in its attempt to fine-tune the private health insurance market. Now a number of policy makers, policy analysts, advo-cates, and others consider the expansion of health insurance coverage to uninsured children to be the logical next step. In 1997 the political climate at the federal level might be conducive to further incremental health care reforms, although efforts to increase children's coverage might have to compete with other initiatives, such as ensuring coverage for temporarily unemployed workers and their fami-lies. According to one survey, 52 percent of vot-ers agreed that expanding health coverage to children should be the next step in health car