The Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) might be crowding out a little bit of private health coverage, but probably not that much, and it’s helped many children get health coverage.
Sheila Hoag and other researchers give that assessment of CHIP in a report submitted by Mathematica Policy Research Inc., Princeton, N.J., to Congress.
Congress created CHIP in 1997, with a provision in the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, in an effort to reduce the number of children without any kind of public or private health coverage. Lawmakers were especially interested in providing coverage for children of low-income working parents and guardians with earnings that exceed Medicaid eligibility cut-offs.
Even many policymakers who believe that government efforts to provide health care for adults distort the health care market supported CHIP, because, they say, children have no independent ability to decide whether to buy health coverage.
But CHIP critics and some supporters have questioned whether CHIP might make matters worse in some cases, by leading employers that provide high-quality group benefits to dump children into taxpayer-dollar-guzzling CHIP plans that might offer inferior benefits and drain resources from private carriers.
Congress tried to get more information about whether CHIP is crowding out private coverage by including a provision in the Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2009 (CHIPRA) that required the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to report on CHIP program performance after the end of federal fiscal year 2010 and again after the end of federal fiscal year 2013.
The federal fiscal year starts Oct. 1 and ends Sept. 30.
ASPE hired Mathematica to create the report, and Mathematica hired Hoag, a researcher at the Urban Institute, Washington, to lead the report team.
Since Congress created CHIP, the number of children without health coverage has fallen to about 8 million, or about 10% of the total, from 11.4 million, or 15% of the total, Hoag and her colleagues write.