SCHIP Provider Calls on Congress to Prevent Grim Future for Uninsured
KIDS
New Hampshire Union Leader
Matt Negrin
Boston University Washington News Service
29 January 2008
WASHINGTON — Insurance coverage for some New Hampshire children will be in peril if Congress does not soon act to counter an administrative rule forcing states to cut back health care programs, a state health insurance official told a House subcommittee Tuesday.
The popular State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), designed to insure children whose families’ incomes are too high for Medicaid but not enough to afford private insurance, will not be able to cover up to 4,000 of 20,000 eligible New Hampshire kids if the state is forced to cut back funds, said Tricia Brooks, president and CEO of New Hampshire Healthy Kids, the Granite State’s SCHIP administrator.
New Hampshire and other states will be forced to cut back, Brooks said, because of an Aug. 17 directive from the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services that requires states to meet certain standards, such as proving that they have enrolled 95 percent of children below 200 percent of the poverty line who are eligible for SCHIP or Medicaid and ensuring that employer-covered children’s insurance has not decreased by 2 percent or more in the last five years.
The House has twice passed a bill to reauthorize SCHIP, but despite bipartisan support, both bills have been vetoed by President Bush. The House last week fell short by 15 votes to override the second veto (42 Republicans joined the Democrats). Many committee members expressed disgust at the vote’s shortfall and attacked Republicans for playing partisan politics.
U.S. Democratic Reps. Paul Hodes and Carol Shea-Porter voted to override the latest veto.
“It’s hard for me to understand the president’s logic, or the rationale of those within Congress who voted to uphold his veto,” U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone Jr., D-N.J., the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health, said at the hearing. “I think they all have forgotten or simply do not understand the challenges that American families face in securing affordable health coverage for their children.”
Brooks said in her testimony that after Congress’s success in passing the bipartisan reauthorization bill last year, “I am discouraged that progress has been thwarted by the President’s subsequent vetoes.”
She called the August directive’s requirements “unrealistic,” saying that states cannot control employer-coverage trends that have dropped for employees and their children.
“The predictability of reauthorization is essential to states,” said Brooks, whose private, nonprofit organization was legislatively created and is run by several government appointees. Healthy Kids is also supported by both parties in the New Hampshire Senate.
Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, who voted to uphold the veto, acknowledged “differences of opinion” on which children should be covered by SCHIP. The program should focus on “the near-low income,” whose parents do not have employer-covered insurance, he said at the hearing.
In New Hampshire, eligible families pay as much as $45 a month per child, supporting 25 percent of the cost of SCHIP, Brooks said after the hearing.
“Unless Congress places a moratorium on the directive, New Hampshire and other states must move backward,” she said.
Pleading a similar case for New Jersey was Ann Kohler, deputy commissioner of her state’s Department of Human Services. She said that as the economy worsens, low-income families “must rely on the safety net provided by Medicaid and SCHIP to provide health insurance for their children.”
###
