Wednesday, August 21, 1996

Tax breaks considered to guarantee health insurance for children

By STEVE RAY
Harte-Hanks Austin Bureau

AUSTIN - Texas lawmakers are considering tax breaks and incentives for businesses to help parents who can't afford health insurance for their children.

Some 1.3 million Texas children - one in 10 of all uninsured youngsters in the country - are not covered by health insurance, officials said Tuesday.

Many of those children come from working families who can't afford the costs of health insurance, according to Corpus Christi state Rep. Hugo Berlanga, who chairs the House Public Health Committee.

"Their families are not necessarily the poorest residents of the state," Berlanga said. "Rather they are the children living down the block, next-door neighbors and kids whose parents work hard for a living."

Berlanga, who chairs the House Public Health Committee, will hold the third of five public hearings today in Austin to study ways to improve health care access for children.

The committee has been charged by House Speaker Pete Laney to study ways of improving heath care access for children.

Tuesday more than 100 business leaders, lawmakers and state agency officials met at a Business Symposium on Child Health to discuss the lack of health insurance for children and its economic impact.

Officials said it made economic sense to avoid costly emergency room visits, keep children in school and stop parents from losing time at work because they have to stay at home with sick children.

"Together we can better identify solutions to the problems we all face when children don't have health insurance," Laney said. "Those of us in government realize we can't meet this challenge alone."

Texas Health Commissioner David Smith said it would cost close to $1 billion to provide health benefits to all uninsured youngsters in Texas.

Of that, about $300-$400 million would be state money, he said. Officials also want to get federal matching funds for money already being spent on health care and use savings from letting private managed-care companies run some Medicaid programs.

Representatives from both large and small businesses, attended the symposium.

"Small businesses struggle daily to find and keep good employees," said Victor C. Yin of Self Chem Inc. in Austin. "We are often at a disadvantage in the kind of benefit package we can offer our employees compared with that offered by large businesses."

Berlanga said that last year, working Texans lost an estimated $22 million in wages and productivity to care for uninsured, sick children.

"We know that 86 percent of uninsured children in Texas have at least one working parent," Berlanga said. "A typical family with uninsured children is a two-parent family in which one parent works and probably has employee-only health insurance.

"And one-fourth of uninsured children come from families with incomes of more than $35,000 a year."