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By JOHN GOOLRICK
Rappahannock Newt Special Writer
A majority of Americans, I daresay, would agree that people who have children should take care of them and that if you buy insurance, you shouldn’t be penalized when through no fault of your own you have to use it.
Yet in our congressional office we get calls all the time from women seeking money owed in child support from their former husbands and from folks whose insurance gets cancelled because they submit a claim or two.
I haven’t done the research to find out what may be happening at the state level with such matters and I apologize.
I do know, however, that many members of the legislature tell me they are constantly called by distraught mothers who can’t raise their children adequately without badly needed court-ordered support payments from the other parent.
They tell me that Virginia child support enforcement offices are so overwhelmed with thousands of cases that there are often very long waits for any kind of action.
According to statistics I saw recently, one of every four American children lives with just one parent and of some $18.6 billion due nationally in child support one year, only $4.6 billion was actually paid.
That means simply that many thousands of parents, again mainly men, think it’s perfectly okay to abandon kids they helped bring into the world. It is surely a sad commentary on the times when increasing divorces and out-of-wedlock births leads to a single parent bringing up children with little or no help from the other parent.
In fairness, I have to say the Virginia Child Support Enforcement Division has been quickly responsive to inquiries from our office.
Yet all the calls we get seem to indicate the state needs to do more to make sure children are taken care of as a basic obligation of both their parents. Federal and state laws on the subject seem adequate, but stronger enforcement is needed.
The matter of our system of regulating coverage by insurance carriers in Virginia also comes up frequently.
I know I am stepping out of my element totally here since the way insurance companies operate and are regulated is exceedingly complex
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