1. Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

2. Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.

Eleanor Roosevelt spearheaded the declaration, which the UN General Assembly proclaimed as a common standard for all nations and peoples on December 10, 1948. From the state of health care and the treatment of children in America these days, you wouldn’t know the US had been involved at all.

–Whitney Curry Wimbish, staff writer

Trump’s Health Care Cuts Are a War on Children

Here’s a scenario that keeps adoptive and foster parent Sara Pendleton up at night: A child falls ill. The doctor is too expensive. Perhaps the child’s parents reduced or cut their coverage because the subsidies that allowed them to afford health insurance expired. Perhaps she got kicked out of Medicare or Medicaid after the GOP slashed that coverage. Whatever the reason, a policy choice forces mom and dad to keep the child home and hope for the best.

The child’s condition worsens. Her parents fear she may die. They take her to the emergency room, their last resort for some treatment. Doctors there give her the medicine she needs. They excoriate the parents, telling them their daughter needed care earlier. Now she has a host of complications that could have been prevented, they say, possibly lifelong ones. Then they call Child Protective Services.

This isn’t just a hypothetical flash of anxiety. Pendleton has seen it happen. She’s fostered dozens of children, including those with disabilities and medical complexities. Children in foster care have the highest rate of chronic conditions of any child population. 

Insurance makes it possible for parents to manage a child’s disability, or to keep up with therapy, or even to simply attend to an illness promptly. Children without health insurance are vastly more likely to die if they fall ill, as medical scholars have pointed out for decades. Researchers in 2010 published an analysis of 23 million pediatric hospitalizations, for example, showing that nearly 40 percent of the uninsured children who died would still be alive if they’d had insurance.

Even before cuts to Medicare and Medicaid in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, millions of children were tossed out of Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. The end of enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies put in place in 2021 means that at least half a million more children will lose their marketplace coverage, according to Georgetown University. Congress is holding votes this week to extend those subsidies that are not expected to pass.