Campaign Action
This is unprecedented. It's obscene and unconscionable. Never before has Congress allowed funding for children's health and community health center expire—even when they were playing games with debt ceilings and government shutdowns, Republicans funded health care for kids and for the underserved. Not this year, not when they have tax cuts for rich people and corporations to focus on. Even those most states have some carry-over funding, the consequences are being realized all over the country.
Right now, a draft of a letter informing thousands of Virginia parents that their kids might lose their health coverage just after the holidays is sitting on Linda Nablo’s desk. “People are going to panic,” Nablo, who is the chief deputy director of the Virginia Department of Medical Assistance Services, told me. “It’s going to cause mass confusion. It’s going to be an increase in the lack of trust in government, that government will do what it says it will do. People will lose their managed-care plans. They’ll lose their provider. It’s going to cause chaos.” […]
Hill staffers insist and the states anticipate that Congress will pass new funding for CHIP in the coming weeks. But the situation has left doctors fuming, administrators bewildered, parents frightened, and politicians shocked. Even if no states end up running out of money and no kids end up losing coverage, the dithering has already diverted state resources, degraded state programs, and sapped state coffers, and Congress’s dysfunction has pushed the stability of an effective, respected program with bipartisan support into doubt. […]
The policy effects are already being felt in terms of wasted money and diverted personnel hours, state administrators have said. Some states have stopped pushing sign-ups too, something that might depress enrollment in the short and medium term, with lower-income and more disconnected parents not realizing that their kids are eligible. “We haven’t been doing even our regular outreach activities,” Stacey Shamblin, West Virginia’s acting CHIP director, told the Charleston Gazette-Mail.
Jam the phone lines of House and Senate Republicans. Call (202) 224-3121, and tell them to stop holding kids hostage and to pass a clean funding bill for CHIP and community health centers.
This literally is kids' lives we're talking about in many instances. The confusion for parents when they start getting these letters mean some won't take their children to the doctor. For many, it will interrupt care. In 2014, Arizona scaled back CHIP, and we know from what happened there what to expect now. "'Some of the children went without needed health services and medications,' a study by researchers at Georgetown University found. A child with Lupus and heart and respiratory ailments was hospitalized because her family could not afford the doctor visits and medications she required. Other children did without medications for their asthma or ADHD.'"
This should be a national emergency. That it's not demonstrated just how craven, how cruel Republicans have become.