Kansas Action for Children focuses on early education, food security and health insurance – Kansas Reflector

TOPEKA — Kansas Motion for Youngsters’s Adrienne Olejnik is aware of the look of children enduring with out a sustainable meals supply, high quality early childhood schooling and advantage of routine medical care.

Her job required she look squarely within the eye politicians of the 2022 Kansas Legislature making selections that didn’t all the time place these needy kids excessive on the agenda regardless of the state’s extraordinary monetary surplus.

“I would really like them to have the conversations that they’ve ignored for the final a number of years,” Olejnik mentioned on the Kansas Reflector podcast. “Now we have too many uninsured children. Too many children are going hungry.”

Right here’s a peek at three statistics motivating Olejnik: 86,000 underneath age six are with out licensed childcare, 43,000 went with out medical health insurance in 2019 previous to the COVID-19 pandemic, and one in six face meals insecurity.

“We’re sitting on that finances surplus, and I do know they need to be cautious and considerably frugal, however they rush to make tax cuts on a regular basis, and but they don’t rush to put money into children. So, if I had a magic wand, I might actually have them think about what their position is to our subsequent technology,” mentioned Olejnik, vice chairman at Kansas Motion for Youngsters.

KAC, a nonpartisan and nonprofit group based mostly in Topeka, works with native organizations, state policymakers and different advocates to make a distinction in lives of kids throughout Kansas. Their quest is to construct a state the place each youngster secures the care, schooling and sources to thrive.

The Legislature yearly produces payments aimed on the welfare of kids, however KAC believes lawmakers regularly settled for established order. The 2022 Legislature voted to carry tons of of tens of millions of {dollars} in reserve funds, which might be obtainable for future investments quite than have rapid impression.

“You already know, proper now, households are surviving — not essentially thriving,” mentioned Jessica Herrera Russell, additionally of Kansas Motion for Youngsters.

The Home and Senate did comply with decrease the state’s meals gross sales tax from 6.5% to 4% on Jan. 1, 2023. The laws signed by Gov. Laura Kelly, who most well-liked the state’s regressive gross sales tax on groceries be eradicated July 1, would lead to zeroing out the state’s portion of meals gross sales tax Jan. 1, 2025.

“When the preliminary lower does begin, it should assist … with these rising prices as a consequence of inflation on groceries,” Russell mentioned. “Hopefully, that cash can return into households’ pockets.”

The Legislature handed an financial growth invoice that featured enlargement of the employer childcare tax credit score. Since 2012, it’s been restricted to sure varieties of companies. Going ahead, all kinds of firms will be capable to deploy the credit score to enhance affordability and availability of childcare for his or her staff.

Olejnik mentioned a wave of organizations and people pleaded with the Legislature to amend state legislation to widen entry to a program designed to help staff struggling to safe childcare.

“That’s one of many successes for us this session,” Olejnik mentioned. “A enterprise can help their workers by both offering onsite childcare, and a few companies right here in Kansas do this. It may additionally subsidize the price of youngster care for his or her workers. So, they will make some stage of contribution to make it extra reasonably priced.”

The Legislature declined to increase eligibility for Medicaid to greater than 100,000 Kansans underneath the Reasonably priced Care Act. The governor really helpful enlargement. Polling has indicated most Kansans help extension of KanCare to lower-income households, however resistance amongst some Republican lawmakers remained. They argued this system may very well be too pricey or creation of an even bigger entitlement program wasn’t good for Kansas.

Olejnik mentioned the state must enlarge the class of individuals lined by Medicaid and make investments extra in supply of Medicaid providers to folks with disabilities on ready lists.

The Legislature accredited, regardless of a veto from Kelly, a invoice forbidding the Democratic governor from continuing with rewriting the $4 billion annual contract with three for-profit insurance coverage firms that present KanCare providers statewide. That laws was controversial as a result of no particular person, group, firm or lobbyist stepped ahead to say possession of the invoice.

Olejnik mentioned the present state contract with KanCare suppliers fell quick as a result of it didn’t require disclosure of vital details about availability and high quality of providers to kids.

The Legislature did, nevertheless, undertake a invoice including Kansas to a brand new federal program boosting postpartum despair protection via Medicaid from the present two months after start to 12 months after start. It was really helpful in January by Kelly, and the Home and Senate included the required language within the state’s new finances.

“We all know that when moms are wholesome, their infants are wholesome,” Russell mentioned. “They’re on that proper path to getting their well being care wants guess. So, this was actually vital.”