PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGNS are heating up along with the summer weather and healthcare is definitely invited to the garden party. But, experts say, this doesn’t mean healthcare will necessarily clear the hurdles required to make anything happen, should a candidate with a strong healthcare agenda get elected. Nor does it mean that healthcare will have any power in swaying the votes.
If recent events on Capitol Hill are any sign of things to come, the outlook is somewhat grim. With limited funds, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program has been the main focus. From all quarters of the nation’s capital – and from the world, really – eyes are looking to see if children will matter. If children can’t get funded, is there any hope of other agendas making it? This is a question that comes easily to mind for some, without an easy answer from anyone – least of all, Congress.
As of press time, Sens. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), Jay Rockefeller, (D-W.Va.) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) have sent to Congress a $35 billion bipartisan bill to renew SCHIP, adding $25 billion to the baseline funding over five years. Currently SCHIP will be unfunded as of September.
Hatch, ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, said the proposal may not be perfect, “(b)ut it’s a true compromise that maintains the integrity of the CHIP program and ensures that it will continue to help the millions of children who desperately need it.”
The committee’s approval of the bill was followed by House Democrats’ July 24 proposal to expand the program by $50 billion, funded by cuts to private insurers’ Medicare Advantage subsidies.
Differences in proposals aside, President Bush doesn’t agree with any major increases for SCHIP for fear it would bring the program too close to universal healthcare.
More heat under the collars of everyone involved.
In a July 10 briefing sponsored by the Kaiser Family Foundation, Kaiser CEO Drew Altman said that though healthcare is a major concern for most Americans, there is a great disconnect between concern and policy. “It’s a bad sign that Washington can’t agree on how to cover kids,” he said. The fundamental differences in Washington are a “grand-canyon wide gulf.”
At the same briefing, Mark Mellman, CEO of the Mellman Group, a D.C.-based healthcare polling firm, said he assumed the debate over SCHIP would regard where to get the funding. “It turns out, I’m shocked to learn, that it’s not just about how to pay for it, it’s a fundamental debate on whether we should do it at all,” he said.
Mellman and other experts predict healthcare will have a difficult way to go as a public policy issue after the election, though it remains the top domestic issue of this decade. Given the SCHIP fiasco, it’s not hard to see why.