Support for Measure A

We recently took our one-year old daughter Siena to her doctor for a check-up.

Yet for 15,000 kids in Silicon Valley, the poorest of the poor, preventative medicine is a dream, and health care coverage comes only in the form of emergency room visits, underwritten by all of us at tremendous cost.

Fortunately, here in Silicon Valley creative minds came together in 2001 – business, labor, doctors and the county to form the Healthy Kids Program. Healthy Kids has provided basic health insurance – medical, dental, vision – for kids 19 and under whose families earn less than $66,000 a year.

Healthy Kids now covers more than 95 percent of the Valley’s poorest children, but thousands of kids still lack basic coverage.

On November 2nd, we can ensure that 100 percent of the kids in our Valley have health care - by supporting “Measure A” on the countywide ballot. Measure A will raise roughly $13 million each year, funded through a modest parcel tax of $29 dollars annually. Make no mistake – we either pay a modest amount by passing Measure A, or we can pay much more when poor kids without insurance show up in our emergency rooms or sick in our classrooms.

Measure A is the wiser way.