Pinellas County's shortfall in matching funds should alert state lawmakers to the need to keep the Healthy Kids program doing what it was intended to do.

With its well-coordinated and taxpayer-funded programs, Pinellas County is usually held up as a model in the delivery of needed services to children. But its shortfall in Healthy Kids -- the state-run, school-based initiative that provides health insurance to the children of the working poor -- has earned the county a far more dubious distinction and, worse, put its low-income kids at another of life's disadvantages.

Pinellas is the only Florida county, of the 35 required to contribute community money to the program, that did not make the "local match" this year. While several local donors have come forward again -- the county's Juvenile Welfare Board, the United Way and the County Commission among them -- Pinellas remains $200,000 short of its $405,000 required annual contribution. So far, more than a thousand Pinellas kids seeking the low-cost insurance have been turned away, and that waiting list is growing by the minute.

A temporary snag would be bad enough, but the financial picture may well get worse before it gets better. For one thing, the Juvenile Welfare Board, which has put up the bulk of the local match since the Pinellas coalition was formed in 1996, has indicated that it will not be contributing next year and beyond. For another, Healthy Kids' state-level governing board recently recommended that the local-match requirement be retained, albeit at a reduced level. Many child advocates and local coalitions, including many in Pinellas, had hoped to eliminate the local match altogether. Pinellas is among a handful of coalitions that pay the highest local-match rate of 20 percent.

The one-two punch has administrators worried about the long-term survival of the local program.

"The Pinellas coalition was very successful in getting into Healthy Kids early and quickly, but we haven't been able to sustain the high level of local match," said Elizabeth Rugg, executive director of Suncoast Health Council, the fiscal agent for the local coalition. "Unless the local match is cut -- or we can convince the Juvenile Welfare Board it needs to stay involved in funding Healthy Kids -- we may be whistling in the wind."

Healthy Kids has been an unqualified success in Pinellas, as elsewhere, and the Juvenile Welfare Board has every reason to continue to support it with taxpayer funds. But state lawmakers also need to wake up. The problems Pinellas now faces can be expected to surface, with even more severity, in other, less organized counties in the future. Lawmakers should make sure that any local-match requirement truly has the effect of getting more poor children covered -- and not, as in Pinellas, merely closing needy kids out.

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