It's been 102 days since the Republican Congress allowed funding to expire for the Children's Health Insurance Program and community health centers, and the only thing those Republicans have done about it is to pass a Band-Aid of $2.85 billion in temporary funding.
Trump administration health officials are even sounding the alarm, warning that some states will start running out of money—even with that Band-Aid—this month. They didn't name the states, but the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families has a good guess. They've just issued a new report on the current status of CHIP in the states.
- If Congress fails to approve long-term funding for CHIP in January, nearly 1.7 million children in separate CHIP programs in 21 states with shortfalls in March 2018 could lose coverage by the end of February 2018. As February 1 approaches and Congress has still not taken action, some states are likely to send notices to families alerting them that their child’s coverage is in jeopardy and may begin procedures to freeze enrollment.
- Based on publicly-available data, 11 states (AZ, CT, DC, FL, HI, LA, MN, NV, NY, OH, and WA) would exhaust all of their leftover FY 2017 allotment and the partial FY 2018 allotment provided by the CR before the end of February. This means they would not be able to cover all children beyond January without accessing redistribution funds. In March, approximately half the states (24) will be in shortfall positions. Without sufficient funding to cover March expenditures, these states would be unable to cover all children beyond February without accessing redistribution funds.
Half the states is a lot of states. Many of them are Republican, if that made a damned bit of difference to the powers that be. The report's authors also point out that, in addition to coughing some money into the temporary funding, Congress changed the way that funds out of the emergency pool are awarded to states, "no longer guaranteeing a specific share of these emergency shortfall funds to any state." That means from this point the remaining $1.7 billion or so left in the emergency funds "will be paid out to states monthly on a first-come, first-serve basis as they exhaust their allotments. […] [B]ecause states are no longer guaranteed any share of redistribution funds, no state can rely on additional shortfall funding in any given month."
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.
The states have to plan for the contingency that there won't be any shortfall funding for them. That means the half of states that don't have funding past March can't count on it being there and will have to start figuring out whether to wind the program down, try to come up with other funding or take whatever measures they can. It means that they can't be taking new enrollments, can't be focused in serving their current clients—they have to be focused on whether their programs will still exist in a few months time. It also means that they are spending precious and depleting funds in the administrative costs of dealing with the uncertainty. In fact, the states that "are running out of funds the fastest have also been taking steps to close down their programs, including making costly eligibility system changes and sending notices to families with enrolled children."
Thanks, Republicans.