Two Relatively Cheap Ways to Make Raising Children More Affordable
Invest in Medicare for Kids and Universal Free School Lunch
When children grow up to lead productive, ambitious, prosperous lives, that reverberates to the benefit of everyone. And when poor children can’t get adequate health care and go to class hungry, they are in a terribly disadvantaged position compared to their more affluent peers.
Reasonable people can disagree about the extent to which poor adults’ life circumstances are a matter of bad choices or bad luck, but it is obvious that poor children did not cause their own poverty. They simply had bad luck. It is thus right and proper for the government to ensure that there is an adequate provision of basic necessities for them.
Unfortunately, this is the part of the American safety net that is the most threadbare. But it doesn’t have to be. Reform in two areas — Medicare for Kids and Universal Free School Lunch — would not only make life more affordable for parents; it would be relatively cheap. It is not just the right thing to do; it’s exceptionally good at delivering lots of bang for the taxpayer’s buck.
Medicare for Kids
Expanding Medicare to cover every American under 18, i.e. Medicare for Kids, would bring coverage to the 3.8 million children who do not currently have health insurance.
It would give parents the peace of mind knowing that their children’s health needs are taken care of no matter what.
It would reduce health-insurance related job lock (thus giving parents more economic freedom and making the labor market more dynamic). And it would save families money because they would no longer need to be paying health insurance premiums for their children.
Providing health care services, and thus health insurance, to children is quite cheap because most of the medical services that they need are routine, preventative, and screening measures rather than expensive surgeries and hospital stays.
The headline price tag of $130 billion a year for Medicare for Kids may seem large but we already spend $22 billion on CHIP (Children’s Health Insurance Program) and $95 billion on Medicaid for Children. Since the children who are currently on those programs would now be under this new program, the total net cost is probably in the neighborhood of just $13 billion. Medicare currently spends approximately $1 trillion annually, so spending $13 billion to expand it to kids is a tiny drop in the bucket of overall healthcare spending by the government.
Medicare for Kids would also be a win for Democrats politically. 54% of Americans say they support Medicare for Kids while only 27% are opposed, that +27% and a two-to-one ratio. Support for Medicare for Kids is +25% among Independents.
Universal Free School Lunches
On top of the moral argument for not wanting poor children to be hungry, and the practical point that good meals help students pay better attention and thus do better in school, making school meals universally free removes the paperwork barriers and stigma that often lead poor children to not actually receiving free meals they are eligible for. And if the government is going to require that students be in school, then it really is on the government to feed them while they are there.
In 2019, school provided 4.9 billion meals per year at a cost of $21 billion. School lunch fees covered $5.6 billion of that. That 5.6 billion is less than 1 percent of the K-12 education budget. Schools also have to spend money to collect that $5.6 billion from children who do not qualify for free lunch.
Universal Free School Lunch is even more of a political winner for Democrats than Medicare for Kids is. 74 percent of the public, including 67 percent of Independents, support it whereas only 20 percent of the public and 23 percent of Independents oppose it. It even gets more than two-to-one support among Republicans.
Combined then, these two programs, Medicare for Kids and Universal Free School Lunch, would cost about $18–20 billion annually. That’s quite small compared to other parts of the federal budget like Social Security ($1.3 trillion) and Defense ($805 billion). It’s about a sixth of what Medicare is projected to spend just on Part D in 2024.
Some things in society, like tickets to Taylor Swift concerts, are unavoidably scarce and thus expensive. If not everyone has access to them, it is not a big deal.
Medical care and food for children is the opposite. It is important that children have access to care and food simply by virtue of living in a country as rich and wonderful as the United States of America.
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