Health care for the young and the aging was the topic of discussion at a Brian Moran campaign stop at Chickpeas in Downtown Waynesboro Friday afternoon.
Moran, a former Virginia state legislator running for the Democratic Party gubernatorial nomination, met with a dozen Waynesboro-area voters today to talk up his health-care initiative, which is aimed at improving the delivery of services across the board in terms of age.
The centerpiece of his plan is aimed at promoting the expansion of Virginia’s Family Access to Medical Insurance Security program. “Two hundred thousand children are going without health care right now. No parent should have to go to bed at night worrying about whether their child will become ill and whether they will have access to health care to address that illness,” Moran said.
The Moran initiative, which he is calling his “Cover Every Kid” plan, would increase eligibility for the FAMIS program from 200 percent of the federal poverty level to 300 percent and allow families that don’t meet that criteria to buy into program at affordable rates. The Cover Every Kid plan would also eliminate the four-month waiting period for families losing health insurance to enroll their children in the FAMIS program, provide for automatic enrollment at birth for children in qualifying families and raise the eligibility standard for working parents to receive Medicaid to the national average.
“There are so many parents now who are working and barely staying above the poverty line. Paycheck to paycheck they’re living, and they can’t afford health insurance. If you increase the Medicaid eligibility to the national average, we can enroll more families,” Moran said.
“This is an area that is not only a moral obligation, but also one that is an economic necessity. Because healthy kids grow up to be healthy and productive adults. This is just a smart investment in our future,” Moran said.
Moran also talked up proposals to raise the age that young adults can stay on their parents’ health insurance from 19 to 26, to make health insurance a better and more affordable option for small business and to provide financial incentives for seniors to start enrolling in long-term health-care insurance plans.
“Ultimately, what I’d like to do is to have seniors treated with dignity and comfort in their own home,” Moran said. “You can do that by increasing reimbursement rates for personal-care assistance, which frankly is more comfortable, but it’s also cheaper as a society to allow seniors to age at home and providing them with services that are necessary to do that,” Moran said.
“We now have a leader, a president, who understands the need for health insurance, and is going to do his very best for universal health insurance, and I look forward to partnering with him to accomplish that. But there are things here that we can do in the area of health care, providing more accessible health care for Virginians, and I want to get going and working on those issues,” Moran said.
– Story by Chris Graham
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