CHIPping away at the social contract

Long before the arrival of the Obama Administration with its explicit goal of expanding health insurance coverage to everyone, the country had achieved consensus on the need to insure all children. The Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), first enacted in 1997, enables relatively low income families who don’t qualify for Medicaid to get low cost, high quality insurance for their kids.Congress let funding for the program expire at the end of September. CMS and the states have been scrambling to shift other funds around to keep the program going. But time is now running out.Alabama looks to be the first state that will have to close its CHIP program, according to Kaiser Health News. Seven thousand kids will be tossed off on January 1 (Happy New Year!) and tens of thousands more would exit a month later. Within a few months, all 9 million CHIP-covered kids across the US will be gone.CHIP has had a dramatic effect in lower income states like Alabama, where the childhood uninsured rate dropped from 20 percent in 1997 to under 3 percent in 2015. Prior political fighting over CHIP funding back in 2004 led to long-lasting damage to the program, and we can expect the same or worse this time.I cheered the election of Doug Jones in Alabama, and find it notable that his first pronouncement was a plea to Congress to fund CHIP even before he is seated. If everyone looked out for their constituents the way Doug does, this wouldn’t be an issue at all.