beautybangla
Chittagong
News: Bush halts extending children's health care to middle income families — 1 year ago
The Bush administration Friday rejected New York State’s effort to expand a popular children’s health care program with the eventual goal of insuring every child in the state.
The decision stymies the expansion of the state’s Child Health Plus Program and denies its benefits to 70,000 middle-income children statewide. State officials had hoped to start enrolling those children in the program this month.
In a letter explaining the decision, Kerry Weems, acting administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said the New York proposal threatened to distract from the program’s central mission: insuring poor children.
“New York has not demonstrated that its program operates in an effective and efficient manner with respect to the core population of targeted low-income children,” said Weems.
While expected, the decision by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services provoked outrage from Gov. Eliot L. Spitzer and New York’s federal lawmakers.
“Today’s federal decision is a cruel blow to New York’s uninsured children, and to uninsured families across the country,” Spitzer said. “New York is prepared to pursue legal action to challenge these rules and step up its efforts in conjunction with our congressional delegation and with other states to ensure that health care remain affordable and accessible to every family.”
Included in the first state budget that Spitzer got through the State Legislature, the Child Health Plus expansion aimed to eventually provide health care to all uninsured New Yorkers under age 19. State officials said they did not have an estimate of how many additional people would be eligible in Erie and Niagara counties.
Federal disapproval of the plan began to look like a foregone conclusion on Aug. 17, when the Bush administration issued a policy requiring children to go without health insurance for a year before they become eligible under the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, which operates as Child Health Plus in New York.
The federal government imposed that one-year waiting period in hopes of preventing families from dumping their private health insurance in order to sign up for the government plan, and New York had asked federal administrators to reduce the waiting time to six months.
In addition, Weems said in her letter that the Bush administration would not approve the state’s proposal to expand eligibility for the program to families at or below 400 percent of the federal poverty level. Eligibility had been set at 250 percent of the poverty level.
Spitzer wanted that expansion in order to ensure that middle-income children would be eligible for the government health coverage.
But Weems said the administration would not do that when it had no proof that the state was efficiently insuring poorer children.
New York “has failed to provide assurances that the state has enrolled at least 95 percent of the children in the core targeted low-income child population, those with family incomes below 200 percent of the federal poverty level,” she wrote.
In response to the federal action, Spitzer plans to meet Monday with New York’s congressional delegation, where he will likely find plenty of support. On Friday, some 25 members of the delegation — all Democrats — sent a letter to federal officials asking them to rescind the strict limits they are putting on the child health program.
The federal decision comes as Congress works to reauthorize what’s known as the “SCHIP” program before it expires Sept. 30.
Democrats want to dramatically expand the program, but Bush has vowed to veto any major expansion, and many Republicans are sticking with him.
“Some states have expanded the program to adults who are hardly needy, much less poor, and now the Democratic majority sees a chance to use the SCHIP reauthorization to finally accomplish what the Clinton administration failed to do, put government bureaucrats in charge of everyone’s health care,” Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, said in a news release Thursday.
Some moderate Republicans are favoring a broader children’s health program, though, which is why Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., criticized the Bush administration action.
“Instead of joining the nonpartisan chorus, the Bush administration is singing a different tune,” Clinton said. “This administration looks right through millions of parents who are nervous that their children will get sick and [that] they won’t be able to afford costly medical bills.”
