The Politics of CHIP
August 27th, 2007 at 4:27 pm
Depriving kids of health care is bad politics. No surprise there. Just look at Republicans in Texas. The GOP-dominated Legislature has found some cruel and ingenious ways to shrink the Children’s Health Insurance Program in recent years. And they have suffered for it at the ballot box.
It’s a history that Republicans in Washington might bear in mind as the Bush administration and Congressional Republicans try the Texas approach to children’s health care.
You can read the background on the White House’s fight against Congressional bills to expand CHIP here. The administration also recently proposed stricter rules for CHIP that mirror the bureaucratic barriers the Texas Legislature placed on the program at the state level.
The administration wants waiting periods before kids can enroll, higher premiums and co-payments, and a requirement that kids go uninsured for a year before joining the program. The Lege tried variations of all three of these. As a result, the Texas program withered, and the political fallout was severe.
Just ask Chet Edwards. In 2004, the Democratic congressman from Waco had no business winning reelection in a redrawn district that was 64 percent Republican. Yet he beat state Rep. Arlene Wohlgemuth, a formidable state legislator, mainly because of Wohlgemuth’s disdain for CHIP. She wrote the bill that cut the program in 2003. (You can read the Observer’s coverage of the race from 2004 here.)
“The CHIP program became the central issue in my campaign, ” Edwards said late last week by phone. “I beat Arlene Wohlgemuth in the most Republican congressional district in America represented by a Democrat because she wrote the law that gutted the CHIP program in Texas.”
Wohlgemuth defended the CHIP cuts in that 2004 campaign with the same spin that some high-profile Republicans are using now: that families who can afford private insurance are dropping their policies to mooch off the government and that limiting CHIP is simply containing government waste. That argument didn’t work so well here.
“The big government issue doesn’t sell because the reality is conservatives should support CHIP,” Edwards said. “It is helping people who are trying to help themselves. It is helping people who have tried their best to stay off welfare and go to work. It helps them from having to decide between going to work and their children’s health care.”
Also, ads about government waste just can’t match the power of kids losing health care. Edwards’ 2004 campaign ran a devastating commercial featuring a single mother whose daughter had lost CHIP coverage in Texas. He credits it with helping to sink Wohlgemuth’s candidacy. (You can watch the ad, courtesy of You Tube, here.)
The ad has lost none of its potency. Edwards said he recently showed the piece to Rep. Rahm Emanuel, the House Democratic Caucus chair. Emanuel was so enamored with it, he played it to wavering Democrats on the eve of the recent U.S. House vote on the CHIP reauthorization bill. “His conclusion was, would you want this kind of ad run against you,” Edwards said. “It had an impact on unifying support.”
As CHIP rolls have declined in Texas, Democrats have gained seven seats in the Texas House. And even some Republicans got the message: last spring, many GOP state lawmakers voted to partially restore CHIP cuts.
August 31st, 2007 at 10:25 am
All of the above is true, sepecially the damage wrought by Wohlgemuth, a dishonest crook.
But when SCHIP money is misused by states and agencies to provide medical coverage for illegal alien adults, then some arguments become quite hollow.
Its hard to argue for an expansion of Childrens Health Insurance Programs when the money is used for adults and non-citizens at that.
Simply more ammunition by people like Wholgemuth.
September 20th, 2007 at 6:53 pm
[…] The Bush administration apparently decided it was tired of looking like the bad guys trying to cut health care for poor kids. As even probably they know, that’s bad politics. […]