HealthBeat FYI: Put the 'Children' back in SCHIP

May 25, 2007

The following are excerpts from Devon Herrick's commentary in today's Washington Times:

"The number of uninsured children in the U.S. is estimated at 8 million and counting. So many uninsured children must mean we're a failure on a grand scale. It means the government must step in to fix the crisis before children start dropping dead in the streets!

"The SCHIP program is a shared-responsibility entitlement. States pay an average of 30 percent of the program costs, and receive federal matching funds based on the state's population, its number of low-income children, and its number of low-income without insurance. States have three years to use their federal allotment or lose it.

"In 2003, states had to return nearly $1 billion to the federal government. They quickly learned their lesson, however, and started expanding their SCHIP programs in an attempt to maximize their federal subsides.

"For example, of Minnesota's SCHIP enrollees, 87 percent were adults in 2005. Arizona has one of the highest rates of uninsured children in the country at 16 percent, yet 56 percent of its SCHIP enrollees are adults.

"So, a program named for helping children now cannot help many uninsured children because the money is tied up covering adults. From this experience, it would seem intuitive that spending more money to continue down this path will do little for the 8 million uninsured children nationwide.

"SCHIP was designed to achieve one specific goal: insurance for children. That goal has been lost in the mad scramble to not lose federal money. SCHIP should be scaled back to fulfill its original intent, and we need to explore better options for achieving that intent."