Rebuilding Trust in Medical Care Is Paramount as Children Potentially Lose Medicaid Coverage: Chris Johnson, MBA

Chris Johnson, MBA, CEO and founder of Bluebird Kids Health, spoke about the importance of building trust with children and their parents as the country faces Medicaid cuts that could affect families across the country. Establishing that trust, he said, will help to get children who need care to the doctor's office so that they do not needlessly lose their coverage due to confusion from the family.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity; captions are auto-generated.

Transcript

What can be done to help children losing Medicaid coverage?

Absolutely, we need to relentlessly advocate for children to be able to have access to high-quality, trusted pediatric care in the country [and] across the country. There's a few very tactical things that I think are going to be really important. I touched on earlier, there's a lot of change coming. I think a lot of folks who are eligible for care are going to be almost locked out of the system due to administrative bureaucracy and confusion, and we need to keep working to reduce that. I don't know if you or others have worked directly sometimes with Medicaid agencies; they tend not to be super well resourced. The guides on how to do things are very confusing and complex. Being able to simplify that experience, and I think using it as our goal to make sure all folks who are eligible are getting services be the mindset is incredibly important for us, especially for children. Especially for vulnerable children, many children in foster care, that are covered by Medicaid. We really need to make sure that those barriers are low.

And then the second thing that I think is really important is, we need to keep building trust with children and families. I think that a lot of really well-intentioned public health things have happened over the last 4 or 5 years, but there were some areas where we were wrong, and I think we need to own where mistakes were made in order to continue to build trust behind a lot of the really deeply validated outcomes we can drive that are science-backed in children's medicine. Because we need to keep welcoming people into the system. We need to let them know that we can be trusted, and we need to be, I think, humble on areas where maybe we, with the best intentions, foot faulted, here or there, over the last several years to rebuild that trust.

The one other thing I'd add is, alongside the changes in the One Big, Beautiful Bill, there [are] also a lot of changes happening around like preventative services in the US that are happening. It's outside of the bill, but it's happening in parallel, {and] that really is a very direct impact on children's health. And tied to the last point I was just making around trust, I think we need to make sure that we're continuing to build trust, we're continuing to advocate for doing what's right for folks, and we're continuing to meet folks where they are and agreeing where has science been solved, and making sure that we're advocating for that and being open about if we've made mistakes in the past, acknowledge that and move forward.

But that's the other really hard thing in pediatric care today, is there's some valid criticisms of certain aspects of care, but there's a lot of questioning of what really is kind of resolved science, with decades of evidence that shows it's really transformative for the health of children in our country. And so it's really important for me that we continue to advocate for that and for doing what's right for the next generation of kids so that we can continue to thrive as a country.