Child Health Care Funding Legislation Not Acted On
By Erik Milster
WASHINTON, Sept. 30 — Congress failed this week to pass legislation that would keep more than $1 billion in children’s health care funds from being returned to the Treasury’s general fund.
Congress had until Thursday at midnight, the end of fiscal year 2004, to vote on similar House and Senate bills that would have allocated the money to the State Children’s Health Insurance Program..
The program, variously referred to as CHIP and SCHIP, was established in 1997 to reduce the number of uninsured children across the nation. Since 1998, the number of such children declined from 11 million to 8.4 million in 2003, and currently more than 4 million children are enrolled in the program, according to a press release from the Department of Health and Human Services..
Rep. Marty Meehan (D-Mass.) on Monday urged members of Congress and the Bush Administration to pass the legislation before the Thursday deadline. Meehan said in a telephone interview that if the funds were returned to the general fund, 17 states, including Massachusetts, would have insufficient federal funds for the programs for the next three years.
“Thousands of children, including 16,000 kids in Massachusetts, could lose their health coverage,” Meehan said in a letter to President Bush, which Meehan’s office released. “This comes at a time when more working families are going without health insurance and the cost of health care is at an all-time high.”
Massachusetts’ share of the $1 billion was about $23 million, Meehan said.
In a Wednesday interview, Meehan expressed disappointment at statistics from the Massachusetts Division of Health Care Finance and Policy showing that as of March 2003, the area of Lawrence and Lowell had the highest rate of uninsured children in Massachusetts. The statewide rate was 3.2 percent, while the Lawrence/Lowell area was almost 8 percent.
“We need to pass this legislation now, it cannot wait,” Meehan said. “Without health care, kids are twice as likely to have to go to the hospital, and taxpayers have to pay for that.”
Meehan was not alone in his fight for the legislation. Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W. Va.), who introduced the Senate version of the legislation, sent a letter Monday to party leaders urging them to act on the pair of bills.
“I call on the Republican majority leader and the Bush Administration to preserve the $1 billion in CHIP money so that we can continue to make basic health care available to America’s neediest children,” Rockefeller said in his letter, which his office released.
According to U.S. Department of Health and Human Services spokesman Bill Pierce, “There is plenty of money for the SCHIP and we have the authority to distribute it.”
Pierce said there is $660 million that Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson is ready to distribute, and there will most likely be leftover funds. A department news release said the $1 billion was to have gone toward enrolling more children in the program.
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