EDITORIAL: GOP holds CHIP health care for kids hostage to other public health cuts

San Jose Mercury News - 1/11/2018

Jan. 11--Congress has become so embarrassingly dysfunctional that it can't find a way to fund one of the most admired, fully bipartisan health care programs of the past 20 years: the Children's Health Insurance Program, which provides basic coverage for 9 million kids, including 200,000 in the Bay Area.

House Republicans are using children's health as a pawn in their never-ending quest to cripple the Affordable Care Act. House Speaker Paul Ryan has to end the petty squabbling over how CHIP is funded and demand that Congress reauthorize it for a minimum of five years.

Failure to do this not only is heartless, it is financially flat-out stupid.

CHIP finances care for 1.3 million kids in California whose families are low-income but earn too much to qualify for Medicaid. The state received $2.6 billion from the federal government to insure those children in 2016. Unless Congress acts, California will run out of funding in March.

This will end preventive care for children that keeps them out of hospital emergency rooms, stops routine problems from becoming expensive chronic diseases and enables children to perform better in the classroom and get off to a good start in life.

And California is one of the lucky states. Some, including Colorado, Alabama, Connecticut and Virginia, have already sent letters telling families their CHIP coverage will run out Jan. 19, when a funding patch passed by Congress in December expires.

Sen. Orrin Hatch should be outraged. The Utah Republican worked with Sen. Ted Kennedy to create the CHIP program in 1997. Hatch is retiring at the end of this year after 40 years in office. Where is his voice in standing up for his legacy?

Hatch and Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat, were a Washington odd couple. They would have harsh verbal exchanges on the Senate floor, then sit down and come up with a compromise. The CHIP program came about because the longtime friends agreed not to let politics get in the way of helping poor, sick kids get the care they need.

How sad that Paul Ryan doesn't share that humanity.

No one in the House or Senate is challenging the value of the CHIP program, but House Republicans insist on funding it by cutting the Affordable Care Act's Prevention and Public Health Fund. The Centers for Disease Control uses this money for immunizations, discouraging tobacco use, and fighting infectious diseases and chronic diabetes.

The absurdity boggles the mind. No wonder Democrats have balked at robbing one essential public health program to pay for another.

The Congressional Budget Office last week estimated that reauthorizing CHIP for five years would cost the federal government only $800 million. This is pennies in a budget that will top $1 trillion in 2018.

If members of Congress want to know why their approval rating hovers around 16 percent -- lower even than the president's -- they need look no further than their failure to continue providing health care for 9 million American children who rely on CHIP.

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