EDITORIAL: Not well: Alarming holes in children's health safety net.

The kids are not all right. Quite the contrary. In North Carolina, our children are facing some big health problems.

While there is some good news in the North Carolina Child Health Report Card, issued annually by the N.C. Institute of Medicine and Action for Children North Carolina, the trouble signs are what we need to heed.

The groups' 15th annual report card measures trends in 15 quality-of-health indicators.

Consider these:

Ten percent of our children are still without health insurance, despite gains made in adding public health insurance programs for children.

Twenty percent of our children -- nearly 500,000 youngsters from birth to 17 years of age -- live in poverty, which in itself leads to a host of health problems.

Perhaps most worrisome, the percentage of our children who are overweight continues to rise. Nearly a quarter of all North Carolina children are obese, which puts them on track for early onset of devastating health problems that will lead to premature death and sky-high health care costs (often paid with taxpayer dollars).

Although tobacco use among high school students continues to decline, the use of alcohol, marijuana and other drugs remains high. About 37 percent of teens use alcohol and nearly 20 percent smoke pot. The early embrace of these substances makes moderation in adulthood less likely.

And while the death rate for infants and children are declining, child-abuse homicides still signal problems in the state's families. There were 33 such deaths last year.

Since the recession has caused a plunge in state tax revenues and the state has had to reduce funding for many programs -- including social services and early-childhood programs -- we fear that progress in improving children's health could be lost and some problem areas could grow.

The ballooning waistlines of our children also need to be addressed, both through educational programs and taking another obvious step -- restoring vigorous physical-education programs to our schools. We need to put fewer junk calories into our kids in the cafeterias and burn more of them off in the gym.

While the state has made good progress in some areas, raising a generation of healthy children is anything but a sure thing -- especially with the uncertainty about education and social-service budgets. This is one place where we can't allow holes in the safety net.