There are plenty of accusations flying from both political parties about who’s hurting the poor kids and their health coverage the most: the Republicans by refsing to pass SCHIP, or the Democrats by expanding it. If past behavior and policies are anything by which to judge, it shouldn’t even be a question. Fiscal conservatives recycle the same lines about “freeloaders” and the private sector year after year, and the lies are just old. But the general coverage of the SCHIP bill’s rise and fall in Congress this autumn has overlooked the meat and bones of the legislation.
First, read this article by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, entitled, “POOR CHILDREN FIRST — OR LAST? Watch What the Administration is Doing, Not What It Is Saying.” Among the highlights, it talks about how the Bush administration has sought to prohibit public school infirmaries from identifying potential SCHIP-eligible children and reporting them to the state for enrollment:
On August 31, the Administration issued proposed regulations that would make it harder to reach and enroll eligible poor children in Medicaid. Several million poor or near-poor children are uninsured despite their eligibility for Medicaid. Since most of these children attend school, federal rules have long allowed state Medicaid programs to contract with school districts to help find and enroll them. Specifically, many states contract for a portion of the time of the school nurse or other appropriate school personnel to identify poor, uninsured children and help them enroll. The Administration’s proposed regulations would outlaw such contracts, cutting off all federal Medicaid matching funds for them. (The proposed regulations would still allow contracts with private corporations to find and enroll children, but not contracts with schools.)
In other words, Bush wanted to block states from identifying the remaining uninsured poor children in America. Private HMOs, of course, would face no such hurdles in talking to school nurses and other public school health officials. The Democratic revision of the SCHIP sought to reverse this policy.
Contrast that with John Peterson’s (R-PA) reaction to a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette opinion short on why SCHIP needed to pass. He claims that he’s always been fighting for poor kids. In his opinion piece, “In Rebuttal: Setting the record straight: Focus subsidized health-care coverage on poor kids,” he says that SCHIP should not extend coverage to lower middle-class children until all poor children have coverage, ostensibly a reasonable argument.
There are half a million eligible children who are not currently enrolled in SCHIP. Conversely, hundreds of thousands of adults are enrolled in SCHIP. In fact, 87 percent of the current SCHIP enrollees in Minnesota are adults. This bill would wrongly remove an important measure requiring 95 percent of eligible children to be enrolled in SCHIP before expanding coverage to middle-income families. Why would we expand coverage to middle-income folks while there are still needy children not enrolled in a program created to cover them?
What may be worse than this reckless expansion is that two million children would drop their private coverage and move onto SCHIP. Shouldn’t we help more low-income kids gain coverage before subsidizing health care for those who already have it?
Two points here:
1. It’s not the children’s fault if adults are enrolled in SCHIP. That’s the the fault of the administrators overseeing the paperwork and failing to verify the age of the enrollees, and it’s the fault of this country’s privatized insurance companies for making coverage so expensive that the poor are forced to break the law or go without adequate medical care. I can guarantee you that parents of middle-class kids would stay on private health care plans if they were reasonably priced and wouldn’t bankrupt them. Millions of Americans are deep in debt and living hand to mouth, paycheck to paycheck. Any family with two or more kids making less than $50,000 a year is going to be in dire need of free medical coverage. Forget paying for college and school supplies; these families are struggling to pay their mortgages. They are fighting to support themselves while working and people who make a little bit less receive the same services for free. It’s like being punished for success when success isn’t self-sustaining. We are a first-world nation, or so we claim to be. Why do we pay more for medical coverage than anyone else in the world?
2. If the Bush administration is requiring more than a Social Security card to qualify for SCHIP and is making it harder for schools to even ntofiy need children and their families that help is available, when will the number of uninsured poor children ever reach 0 and therefore ever make way for middle-income families to receive benefits?
That’s another part of the SCHIP plan that’s just stupid: having to prove citizenship with more than just a Social Security card. I grew up in a middle-class family, and I didn’t see my brith certificate for years at a time. I can imagine that there are a lot of poorer families which have moved from apartment to apartment, displaced or even homeless. How the heck are they going to keep track of birth certificates?
Keep in mind that I, too, believe that every American should have health insurance before we start giving it away for free to illegal immigrants. I still think requiring kids to supply more than a Socia Security card will be as much of a hardship for children registering for SCHIP as it would be for poor adults registering to vote. What do you think?
Thanks to Brendan Nyhan and the Opinion Mill for discussing this.
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