What is SCHIP?
Find out what you can do to help
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.
Children's Health
Coverage at Risk
The SCHIP program will expire in 2007
unless it is reauthorized by Congress. Reauthorization provides an opportunity
to review how SCHIP works, examine what has been learned about children’s health
coverage in the last 10 years, and discuss what Congress must do to continue the
progress made in reducing the number of uninsured children.
According to
a February 2007 study by Families USA, uninsured children admitted to a hospital
due to injuries
were twice as likely to die while in the hospital as
their insured counterparts.
Find out what you can do to help protect children's health
coverage.
Read
more about SCHIP (pdf).