The State Children's Health Insurance Program, which has provided health insurance for some 6.6 million children since 1997, expires one month from today. Two renewal proposals in Congress have stakeholders fiercely debating options to expand the public program.
While members of Congress have sounded off loudly on the two bills, the debate over whether expansion would be a steppingstone to single-payer healthcare has spread beyond the House and Senate.
"SCHIP was supposed to help children from low-income families, but Democrats are now using the program to expand government control of healthcare and undermine private insurance," a recent Wall Street Journal editorial declared.
Sara Rosenbaum of George Washington University responded to the editorial in an entry on the Health Affairs Blog. "Any notion that SCHIP represents the opening salvo in a major philosophical debate about government's role in health insurance is so wildly off the mark as to be un-tethered from reality," she said. Rosenbaum added that SCHIP is a "falsely politicized debate," and the program should have been reauthorized quickly and should have been uncluttered politically.
House Republican Whip Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) previously criticized the House bill's reliance on government funding for health insurance. "Under this legislation, 2.1 million children currently covered by existing health plans would be dumped into a single-payer, government-run health care scheme," Blunt said.
The House bill, named the Children's Health and Medicare Protection (CHAMP) Act, was narrowly approved in a largely party-line vote of 225 to 204, following a long and heated session. The Senate's bill, introduced by the bipartisan Senate Finance Committee, passed the full Senate in a 68-31 vote, receiving enough support to achieve veto-proof status.
President Bush has threatened to veto any major expansion of SCHIP.
Funding for the Senate's $35 billion, five-year expansion would come from a federal tax increase of 61 cents per pack of cigarettes. The House's CHAMP Act, which would allocate $50 billion to SCHIP and roughly $40 billion to block a scheduled 10-percent cut to physicians' reimbursements for Medicare services, would be funded by a 45-cent increase and cuts to subsidies paid to private insurers offering Medicare Advantage plans.