COMMERCE CITY — U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet visited Adams City Middle School on Friday to pitch a bill that aims to make health care available to uninsured and underinsured children.
He’ll introduce the Healthy School Act of 2009 in the Senate in the next few weeks.
It’s designed to provide 1,700 school-based health centers, including 40 in Colorado, with enough funding to help kids who might not otherwise seek care.
“School-based health centers, like the one we are in, are on the front lines of fighting for accessible, affordable and quality health care for kids in school,” Bennet said.
Under the current setup, the centers provide health care to children with Medicaid or Child Health Plan Plus. The centers charge the uninsured on a sliding scale.
School-based health centers typically provide services including immunizations, well-child checks, sick visits, sports physicals and mental- health services.
Bennet said the health centers face a number of barriers that can keep them from treating children enrolled in CHP+ and Medicaid, including complicated billing procedures.
“We have a tangled bureaucracy of payment that ties the hands of these centers as they work to provide health care,” he said. “What this means is that services get provided, but health care centers don’t get the reimbursements they should.”
He said the bill he is working on with Sen. Debbie Stabenow, a Michigan Democrat, will help fix the problem. It would:
• Ensure the federal government has a procedure in place to pay for services provided by school-based health centers.
• Establish a procedure for states to certify to each secretary of state that it has implemented procedures to pay for CHP+ and Medicaid-provided health care.
• Establish a minimum criteria for “primary health services” to be offered by the school care centers, including comprehensive health and mental-health assessments, intervention and treatment, as well as oral health, social and health-education services.
Howard Pankratz: 303-954-1939 or hpankratz@denverpost.com
