State's leaders strike a blow for children's health care
Thursday, July 19, 2007 8:03 AM PDT
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E-mail this articleThe Senate Finance Committee is posed this week to advance a reauthorization plan for the State Children's Health Insurance Program that would provide medical coverage for an additional 3.3 million children nationwide. That's good news for American taxpayers. The public cost of allowing these children to remain uninsured far exceeds the $35 billion needed over the next five years to bring them into SCHIP.
This Senate reauthorization proposal is particularly good news for Washington taxpayers. Sens. Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray were able to include rule changes in the legislation that free up more money for Washington and a number of other states that took steps to cover more children under Medicaid before the creation of SCHIP in 1997.
Currently, SCHIP rules effectively punish states that led the way in expanding health coverage for children. Washington, which now covers some 140,000 children under Medicaid, is prominent among them. Long before SCHIP, this state began seeking federal waivers to use Medicaid funds to insure children who otherwise would not be eligible for the federal-state health program. As a result, Washington has been forced to turn back more than $200 million in SCHIP funds over the past decade.
Cantwell, Murray and more than a dozen of their Senate colleagues have been working for months to ensure that legislation reauthorizing SCHIP ends this practice of effectively rewarding states that never acted to bring more uninsured children into Medicaid or other existing health plans prior to the program's creation. In a letter to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., last month, they argued that current rules act as a disincentive for their states to expand coverage of uninsured children. "Rather than all states having the same incentive to enroll low-income children, for every new child we enroll that falls under our expansion programs, we miss out on the enhanced federal SCHIP payment."
The rule changes contained in the Senate panel's reauthorization would fix this problem, allowing Washington to use all of its federal SCHIP allotment to bring more children into Medicaid. The challenge now is to ensure that these rule changes remain in the Senate bill and getting a similar provision in the House version of SCHIP reauthorization.
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