Trumpcare failed, again, this week in the Senate. That's a massive, albeit temporary, relief—it will be back someday. But while we're celebrating that victory, 18 million people are on the verge of losing their coverage, including nearly 9 million children. Both the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) and the 1,400 community health centers around the country face a September 30 deadline for their funding, after which the situation is murky.
As of Tuesday, the House says it won't make the end-of-the-week deadline for funding CHIP. That means "some states will soon have to alert the families whose children are covered by the program that they could lose coverage, something state officials have been pushing off."
“A lot of states have been keeping quiet because they didn’t want to alarm families,” Joan Alker, executive director of the Georgetown Center for Children and Families, said. […]
Without action, 10 states would run out of their fiscal 2017 CHIP allotments by the end of 2017, according to an analysis from the Kaiser Family Foundation.
But existing projections don’t reveal the full urgency of the story, Hensley-Quinn said. Many states are beginning to prepare for a situation in which they would need to take steps to restrict or close their programs—preparations that states didn’t budget for and that eat up remaining funds. This means states will likely run out before they’re expected to.
In Hurricane Harvey-damaged Texas, those concerns are amplified by officials’ decision to waive CHIP cost-sharing temporarily, which could mean their budgets will be exhausted even sooner, Hensley-Quinn said.
But the House just doesn't have time to deal with that. They're too busy at their tax retreat, figuring out how to screw the poor and middle classes even more. To make matters even worse, many of the same families relying on CHIP also rely on community health centers and are on the edge of panic.
“The anxiety level is increasing on almost a daily basis,” said Dan Hawkins, senior vice president of the National Association of Community Health Centers (NACHC) in Washington, D.C. “There is broad support and agreement in Congress that it should get done, but we are working against a ticking clock and a crowded legislative calendar.”
Community health centers operate in more than 9,500 locations, serving 27 million people, according to the NACHC. They are the main source of health care for many low-income Americans — and the only source of primary care in many underserved areas.
Health centers provide preventive care, counseling, dentistry and primary care to everyone, whether or not they can pay. A sliding fee scale based on income and family size is available to patients without insurance.
But that doesn't matter to House Republicans, not compared to tax cuts for corporations and the super rich. At this point, it's not even a matter of Republicans' inability to do healthcare policy. It's not just incompetence. Because they're plenty competent and creative at figuring out how to make poor people's lives even more miserable.