Giving Compass' Take:

• Foster children qualify for Medicaid health care coverage but many foster kids have complicated health conditions that require frequent and specialized care. 

• How can healthcare services both public and private create partnerships to offer better services for foster children's needs? 

• Read about how foster children are becoming organizers and activists. 

Sherri and Thomas Croom have been foster parents to 27 children — from newborns to teenagers — during the past decade. That has meant visits to dozens of doctors and dentists for issues ranging from a tonsillectomy to depression.

While foster parenting has innumerable challenges, health care coverage for the children isn’t one of them. Medicaid, the federal-state health insurance program for the poor, picks up the tab for nearly all children in foster care and often continues to cover them if they are adopted, regardless of their parents’ income. And as a result of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, foster children who have Medicaid at 18 can retain the coverage until they turn 26.

Yet, Croom and other foster parents say that even with the coverage they struggle to meet the extraordinary health needs of their children. Part of the trouble is too few doctors accept Medicaid, most notably mental health specialists.

Although foster care children make up only a tiny portion of the 74 million Americans who receive Medicaid, this population faces significantly more health needs than most enrollees. These children often have experienced abuse, neglect, violence and parental substance abuse.  About half of them have been diagnosed with mental health disorders, according to the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission.

A 2016 study in the journal Pediatrics found that children in foster care were twice as likely as others to have learning disabilities and developmental delays, five times as likely to have anxiety, six times as likely to have behavioral problems and seven times as likely to have depression.

Foster children’s health problems frequently demand specialized and consistent care, yet these children’s often unstable lives make it difficult for doctors or other health specialists to care for them, said Dr. Moira Szilagyi, a pediatrician based in Los Angeles.

Read the full article about Medicaid for foster children by Phil Galewitz at Governing Magazine