Senators have passed the Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act (S. 275) by a vote of 66 to 32. The text of the Senate-passed bill has been inserted into the House measure, H.R. 2.
The bill would expand the existing coverage of roughly 6.7 million children under the SCHIP program to include an additional 3.9 million. It would provide around $31.5 billion in funding for the program and reauthorize it through September of 2013.
The goal of the SCHIP program is to provide health insurance to low-income children whose families do not make enough money for private coverage but make too much for Medicaid.
This legislation is paid for mainly by a sixty-one cent increase in the federal tax on cigarettes as well as other tax increases on tobacco products. It will now go to a conference with House and Senate negotiators to work out the differences in their two bills.
Notably, many Republicans objected to a provision that allows coverage for “certain legal immigrants” according to the Washington Post article linked below. This bill works to eliminate a previous five-year waiting period for such coverage to be obtained.
Additional Links:
- Bill Text
- Baucus Press Release (pdf)
- Democratic Policy Committee Summary
- Republican Policy Committee Summary (.pdf)
- Republican Alternative (was defeated)
- AP Story
- The Hill Story
- NY Times Story
- Washington Post Story
Congress in Your Pocket
Adding more children to the government dole is not going to help the health care system.
Physicians, hospitals, and clinics get reimbursed at rates lower than their expenses for Medicaid (30% below costs), Medicare (10% below costs), and other programs (like SCHIP). Several states don’t pay Medicaid for several months at a time, if at all.
Because of this, there are many areas where it is impossible to find a physician that will accept Medicaid, and the number of physicians that accept Medicare and other government programs is dwindling, as costs rise and reimbursements fall.
We need a two-tier health care system, as is the norm in most of the rest of the world:
1) a national network of state, county, and rural hospitals, clinics, and physicians subsidized by the government (financially and with free electronic medical records and bulk purchasing discounts) in exchange for accepting Medicare, Medicaid, and other government programs (such as SCHIP)
2) a private network of hospitals, clinics, and physicians free to set their own rates in order to recoup their costs, and free to negotiate with insurance companies for fair reimbursements for services, instead of the current system (as in California) where insurance companies can set their own arbitrary low rates and are protected by law in doing so
If we don’t institute such a two-tiered system now, health care will continue to crumble. This year.