If You're Healthy and You Know It

A new study from the Children's Health Fund finds that one in four children lacked health insurance at some point last year. It's crazy that a country as affluent as the United States doesn't guarantee health care for all its children. Children's health care is pretty cheap, and failure to identify and properly treat common childhood health problems, such as ear infections, can have serious and lasting negative consequences. This is a real issue for schools: Kids who have a lot of absences due to untreated asthma, or who can't concentrate because of an untreated toothache, are going to have a harder time learning.

The Children's Health Fund uses mobile medical units to deliver health care services to children who lack access to health care. Schools are also doing interesting things to try to help address this problem: Community Academy, a charter school in Washington, D.C., has a pediatrician on staff; Young Women's Leadership Academy, a charter school in Chicago, has an onsite clinic that provides health care, including reproductive health care, for its students. These are innovative responses to an important problem, but they're still stopgaps against a much bigger problem.