The Never-Ending CHIP Battle
July 6th, 2007 at 12:21 pm
As if the battle for CHIP funding wasn’t tough enough this session, news comes that all of Texas’ progress could be imperiled by what Washington decides to do. Yesterday an email arrived from Lynsey Kluever, the CHIP expert at the Center for Public Policy Priorities, warning last session’s gains — restoring annual renewal, eliminating delays in coverage, and streamlining the enrollment process — “will be irrelevant if Congress doesn’t reauthorize the federal CHIP block grant.”
This grant, known as SCHIP, provides a federal match of $2 for every $1 the state spends on CHIP. The Democratic-controlled Congress has indicated it wants to allocate the necessary funds, Kluever wrote, but now it must follow through:
The House and Senate have already budgeted $50 billion in new dollars for children’s health in their 2008 Budget Resolutions. Over the next two weeks, House and Senate committees will begin writing the bills that determine how much money states can get for CHIP in the next 5 years. It is critical that they deliver on this promise in the face of a disappointing lack of support from the Oval Office.
In the upcoming issue of the Observer, Dave Mann lays out just why CHIP is so important, even as the President attempts to downplay the massive number of uninsured children in his home state. A recent report by the Centers for Disease Control, he notes,
generated some headline-grabbing numbers: 44 million Americans lack health insurance; one in five children in Texas is uninsured. These figures, while alarming, are not new. The percentage of Americans living without insurance has remained constant for nearly 10 years, according to the CDC. … Texas has long led the nation in the number of uninsured children and adults. We won’t be surrendering the title anytime soon. While little has changed for adult access to health insurance, the numbers tell a different story when it comes to kids. Since 1997, when the Clinton administration passed CHIP through a Republican Congress, the number of young Americans without insurance has dropped by nearly 5 percent, according to the CDC. That may not seem like a lot, but it represents millions of kids now covered by government insurance.
As Mann also notes, many Congressional Republicans, including quite a few from Texas, have long set their sights on killing off CHIP. With Congress in the hands of Democrats, that’s unlikely, but it is important to make sure they fight any attempt to scale back the gains made here and around the country.
July 18th, 2007 at 12:04 am
[…] we mentioned here, Congress has to reauthorize the entire program before it expires Sept. 30, but that seems a given. […]