The Florida Covering Kids & Families Project at the University of South Florida’s College of Public Health works with other organizations in the state to help families get access to affordable health care. It has special outreach efforts for military and veteran families.
CMSI asked Project Director Jodi Ray how the coronavirus outbreak is affecting their work. Here are portions of her response, as told to CMSI.
My team is in some ways part of what’s going on on the front line, because we’ve got people coming to us that are losing jobs, are furloughed, are losing access to healthcare. They’re worried about whether they’re going to need health care because of this virus. How are they going to keep their family fed?
And it’s not just the virus. We’re still getting calls from people who have just been diagnosed with cancer, for example. I mean, there’s still all this other stuff going on. It already impacts people’s lives in a really stressful way. And this is kind of throwing gas in the mix of what is already chaotic for them on any normal day. We have to look at the fact that people are living in all kinds of different complicated situations.
We’ve got multiple women who just found out they’re pregnant. They have to get health care, and maybe they have also in the process lost their job or got furloughed, so they’ve lost health coverage. Some of these would not be getting through this process if we didn’t help them. I worry about that.
We’re helping make these families’ lives a little easier. Veterans and military families have multiple stressors that they’re managing. They have normal family lives as well, which means they may have children who have complex health care issues, and they have to navigate that. If you’re a veteran and you need health care, it only adds to the stress if you think that your children aren’t getting access to health care during that time.
We can take that off their plate and know that’s one less thing they have to worry about. It gets them a little more peace of mind in the process.
FEMA photo by K.C. Wilsey
