Kids Deserve Health Care

Statement

Kids Deserve Health Care

In September, the House and Senate voted to renew and strengthen the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), known as BadgerCare in Wisconsin. SCHIP was created in 1997 to provide health care coverage for children in families that earn too much to qualify for Medicaid, but not enough to afford private insurance.

The bill to renew the program enjoys broad bipartisan support in both houses of Congress. In addition, it has the endorsement of 43 Governors, including 16 Republicans and more than 270 organizations, representing millions of Americans. This bipartisan cooperation is evidence of the kind of consensus work for the common good that the Congress can and should generate regularly, but is so sorely lacking in these highly partisan times. On October 3rd, President Bush, who coined the phrase "No Child Left Behind," vetoed the bill. While I'm not surprised by the President's veto, I'm deeply saddened by it.

President Bush, who has cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans and is spending billions of tax dollars to maintain the war in Iraq, opposes this bill which will bring health coverage to approximately ten million children in need - preserving coverage for all 6.6 million children currently covered by SCHIP, and reaching approximately 4 million more low-income, uninsured American children in the next five years.

SCHIP is a program that lets states tailor the scope of their coverage to the needs of the families they serve. Believing that family-based coverage would be more effective than child-only coverage in providing health insurance to uninsured children, Wisconsin included parents in BadgerCare from its inception and received waivers from the Department of Health and Human Services to do so.

In Wisconsin, BadgerCare has helped thousands of low-income children; and thousands more would have benefited had this bill become law. In 2006, 63,000 children were uninsured in the state, down from 90,000 in 2005. It's estimated that 37,800 more Wisconsin children would gain health coverage under the renewal bill.

As a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and its Subcommittee on Health, I advocated this family-centered approach to providing health care. Using our state as an example, I explained to my colleagues that this approach has worked. Parents are more likely to sign their children up for BadgerCare because they know that they, too, can receive coverage through the program. And children of insured parents are more likely to receive preventive and other more appropriate levels of health care services than covered children of uninsured parents.

The bill also provides other measures to increase state flexibility that I advocated, including:

* State flexibility for verifying citizenship documentation to ensure that people receive necessary health care.
* Increased mental health benefits for children.

My allies in the effort to renew and strengthen this program came from across the political spectrum. Conservative Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) said, "We're talking about kids who basically don't have coverage. I think the President's had some pretty bad advice on this."

Recent census data show the number of uninsured in the country going up. The number of middle class families of four who now go without health insurance continues to rise.
This is a basic question of right and wrong. It is simply wrong to deny any children in this country access to health care because their parents lack insurance or have a low income. The majority of Congress recognizes that. The majority of the American people recognize that. President Bush has no justification to veto this bill. My efforts in the House will now focus on over-riding this veto and providing children the health care coverage they need and deserve.

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