Political posturing obscures the issue
Insuring health care for poor children should be highest priority as Congress votes
By Rep. Virginia Foxx
GUEST COLUMNIST
Wednesday, October 17, 2007

This week Congress will vote on an override of the president’s veto of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). The issue of children’s health care has been highly politicized by some who realize that making accusations about not protecting children — even false accusations — can rack up lots of political points.

Before the issue becomes further obfuscated by political posturing, I wanted to clearly define my position. I support extending the current children’s health-care program. I am a co-sponsor of HR 3584, the SCHIP Extension Act of 2007. This bill extends funding for the State Children’s Health Insurance Program for 18 months so that Congress has time to work out a reasonable compromise.

SCHIP was designed in 1997 on a bipartisan basis by a Republican Congress to cover children whose families made too much to qualify for Medicaid but still could not afford health insurance. It aimed to insure kids from families with incomes up to 200 percent of the federal poverty level (about $42,000 for a family of four). Today the debate centers on who should be covered by a program designed for poor kids without insurance.

The current vetoed legislation has major flaws, which is why eight of North Carolina’s 13 members of the House of Representatives voted against it. Among the flaws are a lack of provisions to keep taxpayer dollars from financing health insurance for illegal immigrants; inattention to rampant use of the program for adults’ health insurance; and funding measures that make a shell game out of fiscal responsibility.

Congress’ SCHIP debate should focus on insuring poor uninsured children first, not on scoring political points. But in some states, poor kids don’t come first. In these states, more adults are covered by the program than kids. More than 500,000 children are currently eligible for SCHIP yet do not have health insurance — these kids can be insured for a fraction of the cost of the proposed bill. At the same time, more than 700,000 adults are covered by the program. The current legislation will allow states to continue to use federal funds to insure adults, even as poor kids remain uninsured.

In Arizona, 53 percent of people enrolled in SCHIP are adults —109,000 all told. One of the worst offenders is Minnesota, where adults make up 87 percent of SCHIP participants. If Congress is going to push a program to socialize medicine for all Americans young and old, it should say so. But selling a program as children’s health insurance and leaving the door open to adults is simply false advertising.

The SCHIP bill also waters down enforcement measures that keep illegal immigrants from using the program and leaves law-abiding taxpayers to pay for insuring illegal aliens. The bill merely requires a Social Security number as proof of citizenship. In light of the fact that many illegal immigrants use stolen Social Security numbers, Social Security Administrator Michael Astrue said that such a measure would not keep illegal immigrants from enrolling in the program.

Plus there is a huge tobacco-tax increase that will cost North Carolina’s economy tens of millions of dollars. Tobacco taxes hurt North Carolina and are not a sustainable form of funding. In fact, the government will need an additional 22 million new smokers by 2017 in order to finance the program.

Making the bill worse, it claims to conform to the House’s pay-as-you-go rules, but only by using a funding gimmick. Basically, new people are added to SCHIP and then dropped after five years. This is a cynical fiscal shell game.

We need a bill that focuses on insuring poor kids first. The vetoed legislation claims to cover children, but in reality hundreds of thousands of adults get coverage while many kids remain uninsured.

Congress can do better. But the House Democratic leadership has refused to compromise. Instead they’ve done their best to politicize an important issue. By making a few fixes and creating a fiscally responsible bill that focuses on children, not adults, and on law-abiding citizens, not illegal immigrants, they would have garnered overwhelming support.

The bottom line is simple. If SCHIP’s original intent of insuring poor children remains unfulfilled, Congress has no business expanding it to cover middle-class adults. Congress needs to stop the politics and work together to create a bill that addresses SCHIP’s shortfalls.