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| Families who do not get asked if they are poor by their pediatricians. |
You mean to actually have me to believe that an impoverished family who takes a child to the doctor, whereby the pediatrician, who has access to the billing information to find out if the child's health insurance is covered by a Medicaid program, is now, encouraged to "ask" by a professional medical society, if the family is poor?
I smell the stench of a Medicaid fraud scheme in child welfare brewing for the benefit of this American Academy of Pediatrics because there is big money in new databases for predictive models and training for mandatory reporters.
This is the same mentality which generated the research of the 1970s to launch CAPTA, the monetization of poor children.
CLEVELAND, Ohio — In the fall, the nation's largest pediatricians' group urged its members to ask their patients if they regularly had enough to eat or ever went hungry.
Now, the same group, the American Academy of Pediatrics, is asking its 64,000 members to pose another question during doctor visits: "Do you have difficulty making ends meet at the end of the month?"
It's a simple way doctors can screen for poverty, the group says, and there are many reasons why pediatricians should care if their patients are poor.
"Poverty shortens life and it makes people ill," as children and later as adults, said Dr. James Duffee, a pediatrician with 30 years of experience who practices in Springfield, Ohio. "It influences how a child grows, even how the actual architecture of the brain develops."
Poverty's effects can be measured at birth. Kids born into poverty are more likely to be underweight and are less likely to survive the first year of life. Children living in poverty are also more likely to suffer from a number of chronic health and developmental conditions, including ear infections, obesity, diabetes, asthma, anemia, and pneumonia, inability to concentrate, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and conduct disorder.
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