By Cliff Montgomery – Aug. 17th, 2009
Despite the Obama Administration’s apparent waffling on providing a federal public option for health care, “atleast 13 states have invested millions of dollars this year to cover 250,000 more children with subsidizedgovernment health insurance,” according to a recent article in The New York Times.
The public health care increases for the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) come five months afterPresident Obama and the U.S. Congress reauthorized the program, a move intended to “vastly increase itsfunding and encourage states to increase enrollment,” states the Times.
State lawmakers–and the people they represent–have recognized this as a top need, even though state andlocal budgets are being battered by the recession.
The states already increasing coverage are Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Montana,Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Washington and West Virginia.
The federal government supplies the vast majority of funds for CHIP – but states designate their citizens’eligibility levels, and must determine if they will spend state dollars in order to collect even more money fromWashington.
State lawmakers also are increasing the coverage provided by the popular CHIP program in other ways.
For instance, three states are eliminating requirements that had forced legal immigrants to wait five yearsbefore signing up for the government health care option–a step permitted by Obama’s re-authorization of theCHIP program.
Yet others now are extending the public health care program to cover pregnant women, or have simplifiedeligibility and enrollment procedures.
“The states’ willingness to spend, even under excruciating budget pressures, is a measure of the support forexpanding health care coverage to the uninsured,” declared the Times in its July article on the CHIP program.
These moves reveal that the Astroturf (i.e., fake grass roots) groups shutting down recent town hall meetingson public health care are filled with little more than ignorant, wild-eyed extremists.
The government-run health care program known as CHIP “has been politically popular since its enactment in1997,” stated the Times, “because it primarily benefits working families that earn too much to qualify forMedicaid but too little to afford private insurance.”
We must pause here for a moment to remind readers that the U.S. Department of Health and HumanServices runs the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), which serves the Medicare, Medicaid, andChildren’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) populations.
The Department of Health and Human Services is “the United States government’s principal agency forprotecting the health of all Americans and providing essential human services, especially for those who areleast able to help themselves,” states its website.
Medicare is a government-run health insurance program for elderly and disabled Americans. Medicaid is agovernment-run health insurance program for low-income people. But back to CHIP…
In several states, CHIP eligibility increases have passed with strong bipartisan support.
The Kansas government in April passed a two-year CHIP expansion worth about $4.4 million. This bill waspassed by an overwhelmingly Republican legislature and signing into law by Governor Sebelius, a Democrat.
Such moves by state governments now are helping parents like Dewayne and Vicky McIntyre of Yakima, WA.The state expansion in CHIP coverage means that the life of Sarah, their 8-year-old daughter, finally isprotected by a government-run health care service.
Sarah is a sick child. At 3 she had to have lung surgery – heart surgery came later, when she was 6. Now thechild has asthma. Due to the spiraling cost of private health insurance, Sarah has been uninsured for about ayear.
“We were into credit card debt and payday loans,” mother Vicky told the Times.
“Her medicine at one point was $880 a month, and we had to pay cash, so we were struggling. It is such arelief now that I can just take her to the doctor if I need to and get her medicine,” she added.
The CHIP expansion extends the much-needed program through 2013. It provides $32.8 billion in extra fundsover that period, which is paid for with a tobacco tax increase.
On the day Obama signed the CHIP legislation into law, he said the expansion was a “down payment” onuniversal health coverage. Let’s hope he was not lying.
