CORRECTING THE MYTHS

Critics of a proposal to expand the State Children's Health Insurance Program —- including the White House —- have stooped to misinformation and outright fabrication to justify opposing the idea. Here's a sampling:

Claim: Middle-class families will drop private coverage to enroll their kids in state programs. Faced with private premiums of $500 to $600 a month for minimal family coverage —- as opposed to less than $100 a month to cover their children under SCHIP —- some families may indeed take this risky option. But studies in the first 10 years of the program show the state programs are most popular among families who lose insurance coverage or through no fault of their own can't get coverage.

In recent years, the number of mandated benefit laws has increased significantly, with most enacted at the state level, but a few applicable nationwide. According to the American Association of Health Plans (AAHP), more than 1,400 coverage mandates exist at the state and federal level. A survey of states conducted by the Health Insurance Association of America (HIAA) documented that during 2001, every state had introduced bills mandating new benefits.

Overall, more than 550 new benefit mandates were introduced in all states, and 65 became law.

Claim: The expanded program will cover families making up to $83,000 a year. The bill allows one high-cost state, New York, to apply for an upper income limit of $83,000, but the federal government could reject that request. (New Jersey would be allowed to continue covering children in families of four making up to $72,100 a year.) Otherwise, no federal matching funds would be provided for state programs with eligibility levels above 300 percent of poverty, or $61,800 for a family of four.

New Jersey officials asked a federal judge Monday to block new Bush administration rules that would make it harder for states to enroll middle-income children in a popular government-subsidized health insurance program for children.

[...]

The state's program offers coverage to children from families earning up to 3 1/2 times the poverty level, or $72,275 for a family of four.

Claim: Illegal immigrants will be able to sign up for benefits. It is against federal law for illegal immigrants to sign up for SCHIP programs. That wouldn't change.

But a look back at the fine print of the 1993 “Hillarycare” debacle shows there may be a grain of truth in the Republican suspicions — and also demonstrates that the GOP believes there is still significant political power to be mined from one of the Clinton administration’s greatest political and tactical failures.

Back in 1993, according to an internal White House staff memo, then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton’s staff saw federal coverage of children as a “precursor” to universal coverage.

In a section of the memo titled “Kids First,” Clinton’s staff laid out backup plans in the event the universal coverage idea failed.

And one of the key options was creating a state-run health plan for children who didn’t qualify for Medicaid but were uninsured.

That idea sounds a lot like the current State Children’s Health Insurance Program, which was eventually created by the Republican Congress in 1997.

“Under this approach, health care reform is phased in by population, beginning with children,” the memo says. “Kids First is really a precursor to the new system. It is intended to be freestanding and administratively simple, with states given broad flexibility in its design so that it can be easily folded into existing/future program structures.”