Child Laws

A variety of child laws are in existence in the United States in response to the various concerns over child welfare and safety that have been raised over the years through anecdotal and systemic research that has been conducted on the course taken by such problems in the country. One such issue that has been raised in recent years relates to the strong concerns that exist over the current form of the health care system of the United States and its level of performance, which have received an especially strong degree of emphasis in the latter months of 2009 and the early period of 2010 after the launching of a new legislative initiative on the part of President Barack Obama’s White House to enact large-scale reforms in regard to the various directives and prohibitions, including in the area of child laws, governing the permissible behavior of the health care industry as to the kinds of health coverage insurance plans and related conditions that it is allowed to present to the market of American health care consumers, many of whom are known to have problems paying for the high expenses associated with the access gained to even basic forms of health care inside the United States. One such provision which was aimed at by the President’s ambitious agenda of reform, which faced a lengthy and much publicized campaign of opposition directed by the conservative leaning sections of the Republican Party and their allies among right wing media outlets and pundits, consisted of a section of child laws which had been stirring up particularly strong concern among observers of the health care field and the existing system in place for enforcing child laws, that of the noted tendency on the part of health care insurers to deny health care insurance coverage plans to children who were found to have preexisting medical conditions, thus landing families without substantial financial resources in a deep pit without the option of taking recourse to child laws which might address such issues.
The passage of President Obama’s package of health care reform legislative measures proved to be a deeply divisive process, arousing at time intemperate degrees of hostility and opposition from its enemies on the rightward spectrum of America’s political landscape that were tied to vaguely but strongly expressed fears of totalitarianism and government takeovers of the basic functions of life. This opposition was spread to a significant degree among conservative components of the American political scene despite appeals, in the opposite direction, that called attention to the opportunity presented by the presence of the legislation in the decision-making process of the houses of Congress to devote hitherto absent attention to such issues as this matter of child laws. Such arguments did not achieve the desired effect of establishing a more measured tone and possibly a greater degree of support from a wide range of actors with differing political opinions, but tended to be disregarded in lieu of an emphasis placed by both sides of the political aisle, though to differing substance and effect, on the sheer scale of the reforms proposed to the health care insurance coverage system in place in the contemporary United States and the prospective feasibility of the idea of making such reforms within a framework of some measure of financial responsibility and systemic efficiency.

Despite all the furor expressed throughout the political world, the health care reform legislation was finally passed into effect in late March 2010 by the House of Representatives, having been already approved by the Senate in December 2009. At that point, the debate and tactics of political opposition expressed against the health care reform measure changed from those geared toward stopping its passage into established legislation to guaranteeing political payback for those who had supported its approval and trying to create measures for pulling back or modifying its various provisions. One such provision consisted of the section on child laws intended to assure that children who had already been found to be suffering from preexisting conditions would be guaranteed of the ability of their parents or guardians to secure affordable health care insurance plans despite the knowledge of the presence of their health care issues.

Criticisms were soon issued to the effect that the health care insurance industry had announced that adopted into the word of the law it would be interpreting the language of the relevant codicil of the bill as referring only to children already covered by health care insurance plans, in the effect of guaranteeing that any provisions being denied at the moment to children who nonetheless had some other form of coverage would from that moment be available to them, but that children who were not covered at the current point in time by any kind of health care protection would be forced to wait for their assurance of being given access to it until 2014, when the legislative package of health care reform measures will go into effect to announce that all Americans must under law be under some form of a health care plan. It was charged by prior political opponents of the process of passing the bill into law that the undue haste and the ambition involved in knitting a variety of different measures into one large legislative package had caused lawmakers to neglect the many vital issues involved in the health care reform legislation and rush to action before properly considering the relevant issues such as those of the needed child laws. In response to the raising of these concerns, the Obama administration and its allies among Democratic lawmakers have put out press releases to the effect that the bill is indeed intended to assure that children will immediately enjoy the right to full health care coverage under the existing child laws in place but that it will have the agency of Health and Human Services issue regulations which will have the effect of clarifying that the codicil is intended to cover both individual benefits and the general issue of access.