Close Close
Popular Financial Topics Discover relevant content from across the suite of ALM legal publications From the Industry More content from ThinkAdvisor and select sponsors Investment Advisor Issue Gallery Read digital editions of Investment Advisor Magazine Tax Facts Get clear, current, and reliable answers to pressing tax questions
Luminaries Awards
ThinkAdvisor

Life Health > Health Insurance > Life Insurance Strategies

Skeptics React To Bush SCHIP Increase Proposal

X
Your article was successfully shared with the contacts you provided.

The Bush administration has raised eyebrows with recommendations that Congress dramatically increase the spending authorization for the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Originally, SCHIP was set to get about $5 billion per year, or $25 billion from fiscal year 2009 to fiscal year 2013.

Democrats and some Republican allies in Congress recently fought a bitter battle in an unsuccessful effort to increase spending by $35 billion, to a total of $12 billion per year, or $60 billion over 5 years.

President Bush vetoed the SCHIP expansion bill, and Congress ended up rushing to pass a bill that would increase SCHIP funding only slightly, to $6.6 billion in the current fiscal year, fiscal year 2008, which started Oct. 1, 2007.

Now the Bush administration has proposed increasing SCHIP spending authorization by $4.2 billion per year, or $19.7 billion over 5 years, to a 5-year total of about $45 billion.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Washington, believes Congress would have to increase SCHIP funding at least $4.3 billion per year, or $21.5 billion over 5 years, to permit states to continue to cover as many children as they now cover, according to Edwin Park, a senior fellow at the center.

The Bush administration budget proposal would pay for the SCHIP funding increase solely by cutting the budget for Medicaid, Park notes.

Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, says congressional SCHIP reauthorization efforts failed in the past year partly because the Bush administration insisted that the program needed only about $1 billion in extra funding per year, or $5 billion in additional funding over 5 years.

“A lot of members of Congress relied on the administration’s estimates,” Grassley, the highest ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, writes in a letter to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

“I don’t know how or why they revised their estimate by more than 400% in a few months,” Grassley writes. “It’s good they got religion, but I wish they’d seen the light last fall. We might have avoided a lot of time and trouble and gotten far better policies instilled in the program.”


NOT FOR REPRINT

© 2024 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.