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It's now been a full month since funding the Children's Health Insurance program, community health centers, and a variety of smaller health programs expired. No child has lost care yet, because most of the states have had enough funding to continue coverage. A few states have had to get emergency funding from the government to keep their programs going, and they'll soon be joined by more, but the emergency funding isn't going to last forever. Some states have laws that require they end their own funding of children's health programs if the federal money goes away.
Meanwhile, House Republicans are still playing games with the funding and Senate Republicans are busy trying to jam through Donald Trump's abysmal nominees and giving massive tax breaks to rich people.
Every single day that passes intensifies the looming crisis for children's health.
States with separate CHIP programs (which enroll about 44 percent of kids with CHIP coverage nationwide) have begun preparing for when they exhaust their federal CHIP funding. These states are contemplating freezing enrollment, scaling back eligibility, or ending their programs altogether, the Center for Children and Families reports. States with CHIP-funded Medicaid expansions must continue coverage for their CHIP-eligible children but only at the state’s regular matching rate for federal Medicaid funding, which averages 57 percent across the states, well below the current average CHIP matching rate of 93 percent.) Arizona, Colorado, Texas, Utah, and Virginia are among states with laws requiring them to close their CHIP programs if no federal funding is available. And while these states won’t reach that point until December or January, they will soon have to send notices to families about the coming end of their CHIP program.
Even if the President and Congress eventually fund CHIP and these state actions are temporary, they can cause lasting damage to children. Arizona froze enrollment in its CHIP program in 2009 and enrollment dropped by more than 60 percent in less than two years. And North Carolina experienced a 30 percent enrollment drop when it implemented a freeze in 2001.
This has never been a controversial thing, making sure kids have health care, in Congress. It has lately been a political football for Republicans, because that's what they do, but we've never had a Congress—Republican or Democratic—incapable of taking care of this very basic thing. It takes a stunning degree of both incompetence and callousness to fail here, a bar that Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell are uniquely qualified to reach.