BuckeyeBlog

Last week, the House of Representatives and the Senate passed a bill to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). All the Democratic members of Ohio’s Congressional delegation voted in favor of it (except for Dennis Kucinich, who wanted government extension into health care expanded even more). That was to be expected. Unfortunately, a number of Ohio’s Republican members who voted against the initial version of the bill this summer voted for the compromise version. Representatives Pryce, LaTourette, Regula, Hobson, Tiberi, and Turner all supported this bill.

Why would they change their votes? There were some changes made to the bill. Some provisions relating to Medicare were deleted, for instance, and there was a provision inserted to overturn the Bush Administration’s regulations that states must provide coverage for poor kids before expanding the program to the middle class. But the underlying bill was the same — tax the poor (smokers) to extend government health care to the middle class (who, incidently, don’t need it).

I’m going to pick on Ralph Regula (mainly because he was nice enough to put a statement up about his vote, which other House members did not do. I guess that’s what you get for being open with the public). He stated:

I voted today with a majority of my colleagues in the House of Representatives to extend SCHIP to expand healthcare access to the children of working parents whose income is too high to qualify for Medicaid, but who for one reason or another do not have any health insurance coverage through their employers.

I have to admit, I like the way he phrases the issue. Most news reports say that SCHIP is a program for “the working poor whose income is too high for Medicaid but too low to afford private insurance.” At least Rep. Regula acknowledges that there are other resons besides affordability that people do not have health insurance. However, this program is also being extended to families that have private health insurance but fall within the income guidelines of SCHIP eligibility. Most kids between 200% of the Federal Poverty Level (FPL) and 300% of FPL live in families with health insurance. According to the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, around 80% of all kids in this income range have private insurance.

The program has proven extremely successful in covering many children who had fallen through the cracks and providing them with quality preventive and acute healthcare. This bill provides states with new tools to enroll more eligible low income children with health coverage.

I guess it depends on how you define “low income.” The bill overturns a Bush Administration rule that forces states to cover 95% of low income (below 200% of FPL) kids before expanding it to higher income kids and adults. If Rep. Regula was really concerned about low income kids, then he should not have supported this bill.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007 at 11:34 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.