The Times West Virginian

Opinion

September 26, 2009

CHIP critical ingredient in nation’s recipe for health care

You want to bake a cake. You mix all of the ingredients together, pour the batter in the pan and place it in the oven. Thirty-some minutes later, you come back to the oven expecting to find a delicious cake.

Instead, you find a flat mess.

A quick review of ingredients reveals one missing — baking powder, the leavening agent. And without that ingredient, the recipe just doesn’t work.

Sometimes that’s all it takes, one missing piece and the whole thing doesn’t work.

That’s how we feel about any health-care reform bill without a provision for the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Last week, child advocacy groups called attention to the fact that in none of the measures before Congress to overhaul the nation’s health-care system is a specific program to replace CHIP.

“CHIP has been an enormously successful program, and it’s not clear what would replace it,” Renate Pore, founder of the West Virginia Healthy Kids and Families Coalition, told the Charleston Gazette last week. “Everybody is very concerned about that.”

And there’s a reason to be concerned.

Consider the fact that about 25,000 children are insured through CHIP in West Virginia. These are children who come from working families, parents who make too much money for their children to receive health-care benefits through Medicaid but make too little to afford traditional insurance premiums.

Also consider the fact that more than 96 percent of children in the state of West Virginia have health insurance coverage, through either private insurance, Medicaid or CHIP. That is a ratio to envy across the country. And it shows you that programs like CHIP work.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller has introduced an amendment to the bill before the Senate Finance Committee, at least one of several hundred proposed and one of 45 introduced by Rockefeller himself, that would take CHIP off the chopping block.

Also consider without this amendment, it’s not just 25,000 children in West Virginia who could lose CHIP coverage, but 14 million nationwide by 2013. It’s not as if these children will go without coverage — most of them could enter into federally funded insurance programs through private companies, that is unless efforts to create public option in the overhaul are successful. And also consider that if whatever system is in place, if these children have coverage less than what CHIP initially offered, it may be up to the states to fill in the gaps. And at this point, who can even estimate what kind of unfunded mandate that would mean to individual states?

“Rather than creating massive dislocation of coverage for 14.1 million children in 2013, the amendment seeks to build upon what works,” reads the narrative that accompanies Rockefeller’s amendment to restore the CHIP program.

So we have to ask this question — if CHIP works, why chop it?

Shouldn’t programs like CHIP be a model to health-care reform instead of the scraps on the floor when the system is “fixed?” Walking into an unknown, shouldn’t we have some known solutions?

It’s like baking a cake and just hoping it will turn out, even though you’ve left out a few ingredients.

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