The Washington Post’s coverage of the Bush administration’s new S-CHIP initiatives is totally overblown. These initiatives inject a badly needed dose of common sense into the current policy. But if you only read the Post, you’d think Bush was personally going around from state to state unhooking six-year-old leukemia patients from their IVs. Here’s the Post:
The Bush administration, engaged in a battle with Congress over whether a popular children’s health insurance program should be expanded, has announced new policies that will make it harder for states to insure all but the lowest-income children.
Let’s stop right there for a second and consider the actual policy changes:
- States seeking to insure children from families earning more than 250 percent of the poverty level — or around $51,500 for a family of four — must put in place a new eligibility requirement. Only children that have been uninsured for at least one year can sign up for the government plan.
The need for such a provision is obvious. Many of the more liberal states keep expanding their S-CHIP coverage — in New York it will soon be up to 400 percent of the poverty level, or around $83,000 for a family of four — and the federal government keeps picking up the tab. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that in a large number of cases, this federally funded coverage simply replaced the private insurance these kids already had. The government shouldn’t be providing health insurance to people who can afford it, much less to people who already have private coverage. That’s all this provision says.
So will this policy “make it harder for states to insure all but the lowest-income children”? Technically, yes, but does that mean that all but the lowest-income children are going to be uninsured? No.
- The state must demonstrate that at least 95 percent of children from families making less than 200 percent of the poverty level are enrolled in S-CHIP or Medicaid.
Health officials from states like New York and New Jersey that have gone overboard with S-CHIP are complaining that 95 percent enrollment is impossibly high and that no state has ever met that standard. They are missing the point of this policy, which is that maybe enrolling low-income kids in existing entitlement programs should be a bigger priority than creating new entitlements for middle-income kids.
The New York Times does a slightly better job of presenting the arguments fairly.