President's Budget May Provide States With Inadequate Funding To Maintain Current SCHIP Programs
Budget Does Not Provide Funds to Insure More Children
End Notes
[1] Last year, the Administration’s fiscal year 2008 budget proposed to reauthorize SCHIP for five years, but would have provided only $4.8 billion in SCHIP funding above the baseline. Congressional Budget Office estimates last year indicated that the Administration’s proposal would have closed less than half of the federal funding shortfall projected for the five-year period from 2008 through 2012. See Edwin Park and Matthew Broaddus, “CBO Estimates President’s SCHIP Proposal Would Lead to Large Enrollment Declines and Funding Shortfalls,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, March 13, 2007 and Congressional Budget Office, “Additional Information on CBO’s Estimate of the Administration’s SCHIP Proposals,” March 9, 2007.
[2] As part of the extension of SCHIP through March 2009, Congress provided $1.6 billion in fiscal year 2008 and $275 million in fiscal year 2009 above the $5.0 billion-a-year baseline funding level in order to avert the federal funding shortfalls otherwise projected to occur through March 2009.
[3] Cindy Mann and Michael Odeh, “Moving Backward: Status Report on the Impact of the August 17 SCHIP Directive to Impose New Limit on States’ Ability to Cover Uninsured Children,” Center for Children and Families at the Georgetown University Health Policy Institute, December 2007. States already covering children above 250 percent of the poverty line must comply with the August 17, 2007 directive by August 17, 2008. States implementing planned expansions were effectively barred from covering such children upon issuance of the directive.
[4] States already covering children with incomes between 200 percent and 250 percent of the poverty line could apparently continue to cover such children, but only at a reduced SCHIP matching rate or the federal Medicaid matching rate. (On average, the federal government pays for 70 percent of the costs of SCHIP but 57 percent of the costs of Medicaid.)
[5] The August 17, 2007 guidance requires states to use a gross income test, under which all family income is counted in determining whether the family’s income exceeded the guidance’s limit on SCHIP coverage of children with incomes in excess of 250 percent of the poverty line. The President’s budget proposal would codify this 250 percent of poverty gross income limit.