There's an underreported side to the S-CHIP debate that was summarized brilliantly by Bitch Ph.D. the other day.
SCHIP covers children and pregnant women. Moving adults off it means not providing health care to pregnant women. Make sure that anyone you talk to about this knows that.
Culture of life, my mama ass.
The reason for this goes all the way back to the abortion debate and the fight to give unborn children full rights. The Republicans are now trying to have it both ways, calling for "moving adults off S-CHIP" when they specifically pushed for their inclusion before.
In 2002, when Republicans held the majority in the House, there was a big debate in the Congress over adding "unborn children" to the list of possible recipients for S-CHIP.
With momentum building in Congress in recent years in favor of such proposals, the Bush administration announced in February that it would take steps, in the words of Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson, to "enable states to make immediate use of the extensive funding already available under SCHIP to provide prenatal care for more low-income pregnant women and their babies."
The administration's chosen means to achieve this goal—deeming the fetus an "unborn child" eligible for benefits under the SCHIP law—raised immediate alarm bells within the reproductive health and public health communities about the administration's motivations behind the policy and its impact on the scope of care available to women. By conferring benefits only upon the unborn child, they said, the proposal unnecessarily injects abortion politics into the prenatal care debate in a way that will shortchange pregnant and postpartum women.
This was a divisive attempt to insert abortion politics into this program. The practical result was that the list of services offered to low-income pregnant mothers for reimbursement were only those that directly affected a fetus. There was an immediate outcry, and a bipartisan majority in Congress introduced several bills to extend S-CHIP coverage to pregnant women, with the children becoming eligible for the program after birth. Like Medicaid, the proposals would cover women for 60 days postpartum. By November 2002, the President offered what amounts to a fake loophole:
In November, it issued a guidance to state Medicaid directors indicating that those states that reimburse health care providers for the traditional package of pregnancy-related services (including prenatal care, delivery and postpartum care) through a single "bundled" payment may continue to do so. Only 28 states provide such a bundled payment, however, and such payments typically cover only "routine" care. Thus, even in those states, women will still be left to foot the bill for serious and costly medical complications.
This threading of the needle to include "unborn children" on the program but to exclude "pregnant women" is completely shameful. But states gradually started to work with the Administration to get minimum prenatal care covered under SCHIP. Here's a press release from June 2003 touting Illinois' plan to cover 41,000 pregnant women. Rhode Island and Michigan were the first. In all, 12 states, including California, Texas and Massachusetts, have added the "unborn child rule" into their S-CHIP plans. But they all largely worked around the issue through various maneuvers, reverting to the standards of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Academy of Pediatrics that a pregnant woman and her child should be treated together.
This time around, with a Democratic majority, there was no way that pregnant women wouldn't be added into the eligible class. This is why the religious right opposed expanding S-CHIP immediately.
The new House bill changes the SCHIP program to cover health insurance for a "pregnant woman," rather than cover the child in the womb. This would undermine the "unborn child rule" and could possibly allow funding for abortions in those States that include abortion as part of their Medicaid health coverage for pregnant women.
This is the spectre they raise, but really the mandate here is to allow full medical care for poor pregnant women, including postpartum care, to ensure that their child is delivered healthy and they are kept alive in the process. Pro-life forces in the Senate tried to insert the "unborn children" language back into the bill and they lost.
So now the President's talking point is that he wants to move "adults" off the bill. What he really means is moving pregnant women off the bill, and that fact should be far more well-known than it is. The Administration tried to play this cute and use S-CHIP in 2002 as a vehicle to achieve "fetal personhood," and in the process pregnant women gained some access to services. Now that the fetal personhood aspect of this has been squashed, he wants them to fend for themselves - as well as the babies they carry.
As you may know, BlogPAC and Blue America are starting a program to make robocalls into the districts of five Democrats who voted against S-CHIP when it came up for vote.
Jim Marshall (GA)
Baron Hill (IN)
Gene Taylor (MS)
Bob Etheridge (NC)
Mike McIntyre (NC)
The Democratic House leadership put the hammer down and representatives like Dan Boren and Heath Shuler switched their votes in favor of S-CHIP, but these five Bush Dogs continue to religiously support the Bush administration’s short-sighted, inhumane and regressive policies.
We’ve asked you to reach out and call the offices of these Representatives, and now we’re stepping up our efforts.
These calls were recorded by Michelle James, a full time working mother who can’t afford health care for her son who has bronchitis. You can hear one of the calls here.
While we believe that there should be a big tent within the Democratic party, there are some issues that are not negotiable, and making sure kids have health care is one of them.
When you make these calls, let these members know that you believe pregnant women should be part of a strategy to ensure children's health insurance coverage. And you can support these efforts financially at the Blue America PAC's ActBlue page.