SCHIP
Early Win on SCHIP (Children’s Healthcare) Signals
A New Era with New Priorities Has Begun
In January both the House (289-139) and the Senate (66-32) in strong, bipartisan votes, passed an expanded version of SCHIP, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. Former President Bush vetoed SCHIP expansions twice. SCHIP currently covers 7 million children. The newly passed version will cover 4 million more. In California, 900,000 children rely on SCHIP.
More than 1.2 million Americans have lost their jobs in the last year. California’s unemployment rate is the 4th highest in the nation, at 9.3%.
With every 1% increase in unemployment, 1.5 million Americans lose their health insurance. California’s healthcare services for kids already saw budget cuts this year and are facing more.
We succeeded in communicating that fixing healthcare is a huge part of fixing the economy. Now, more than ever, working families need healthcare we can count on. By delivering a strong SCHIP vote to the President early in his administration, healthcare advocates and Congress are sending a message: now is the time for healthcare reform.
What is SCHIP?
The State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) was enacted by Congress in 1997 to increase health insurance coverage for low-income children. At the time, more than 10 million children lacked health insurance.
About 7 million of them lived in families with incomes below twice the federal poverty level (today, that would be $33,200 for a family of three). Although 75 percent of those uninsured children lived in a family with at least one parent who worked full-time, and 90 percent had a parent who worked either full or part-time, their families either were not offered job-based health insurance or could not afford to buy the insurance that was offered.
The SCHIP program gave states a total of $40 billion over 10 years to provide health coverage for these children, who lived in families that earned too much to qualify for Medicaid, but not enough to afford private insurance.
Read more about SCHIP (pdf).