Congressional negotiators have made significant changes in the SCHIP
legislation President Bush vetoed in order to address key concerns raised
by critics. Rather than welcome these changes, the Administration appears
to be escalating its distortions of what the new bill does, claiming the
bill “fails to prioritize poor children” and “misdirects funds from poor
children to adults.” Such statements stand the truth on its head.
Most notably, the new bill prohibits states from raising their SCHIP income
limits above 300 percent of the poverty line. It also focuses all of its
financial incentives for enrolling uninsured children on states that succeed in
enrolling more children who are eligible for Medicaid, most of whom are below
the poverty line. Unlike the vetoed bill, none of the incentive payments would
go for enrolling more eligible children in SCHIP. This provision is the very
definition of “poor children first.”
In addition, the bill tightens citizenship documentation procedures to
respond to the spurious charge that the original bill would open Medicaid to
illegal immigrants. As under the original bill, states could substitute a Social
Security Administration match of the validity of each applicant’s Social
Security number for more onerous verification procedures that have kept
thousands of eligible poor citizen children out of the program. But under the
new bill, these states would also have to confirm an applicant’s citizenship
through the SSA database — and would have to require applicants to produce a
birth certificate, passport, or similar documentation if the SSA database lacked
this information.
The new bill also makes it more financially rewarding for states to use some
of their SCHIP funds to help families buy private coverage through their
employers, if it is available. This change responds to overblown claims that the
earlier bill would mainly shift children from private to public coverage.
Finally, the new bill terminates SCHIP coverage for childless adults at the
end of next year, nine months earlier than under the original bill. That
undercuts another false charge: that the earlier bill favored adults over
children.
Now that the bill’s supporters have taken significant steps to allay critics’
concerns, the question is whether those critics will acknowledge what the bill
actually does — or instead distort it even more shamelessly than they did with
the original legislation.
