Desired Outcomes:

• Health Insurance - Provide youth with special health care needs with accessible and affordable health insurance coverage



• Medical Home - Assure that all youth with special health care needs have medical homes responsive to their needs.
  
  *Medical Home - medical care of infants, children, and adolescents ideally should be accessible, continuous, comprehensive, family centered, coordinated, compassionate, and culturally effective. It should be delivered or directed by well-trained physicians who provide primary care and help to manage and facilitate essentially all aspects of pediatric care. The physician should be known to the child and family and should be able to develop a partnership of mutual responsibility and trust with them.

Youth with special health care needs are neither CHILDREN nor ADULTS. Their issues and concerns are similar, but different from both. This pivotal time called youth should be a time in which the total environment supports the child in becoming an adult. The support should encourage the aspirations and expectations that lead to productive adulthood – or – if supports are absent, it can be a time of actions that ingrain doubt, confusion and lack of initiative.