White House moves to strip New York state of SCHIP money
I wonder if Randy Kuhl, Jim Walsh, and Tom Reynolds support this:
The Bush administration, continuing its fight to stop states from expanding the popular Children’s Health Insurance Program, has adopted new standards that would make it much more difficult for New York, California and others to extend coverage to children in middle-income families.
(snip)
After learning of the new policy, some state officials said today that it could cripple their efforts to cover more children by imposing standards that could not be met.
Ann Clemency Kohler, deputy commissioner of human services in New Jersey, said: “We are horrified at the new federal policy. It will cause havoc with our program and could jeopardize coverage for thousands of children.â€
(snip)
Two Republican senators, Charles E. Grassley of Iowa and Pat Roberts of Kansas, urged the Bush administration last week to deny New York’s request to cover children with family incomes up to four times the poverty level. The proposal, they said, violates the original intent of Congress, which wanted to focus on lower-income children.
But Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York said that, “contrary to the senators’ objections,†federal law allows states to set higher income limits.
“Granting this expansion is essential to the health and well-being of New York’s children,†Mr. Spizter said.
hey thanks for the nod of approval
Kuhl, at least, didn’t engage on this issue. Instead, he’s concentrating on the loss of Medicare Advantage benefits (which is real, but they unfairly privilege 20% of Medicare recipients, and HMOs), the tiny tax on private insurance, and the loosening of id requirements for Medicaid (which included the need for a certified copy of a birth cert.).
In other words, he realizes it’s political suicide to engage in frontal attack on S-CHIP. Bush (motto: when you got nothing, you got nothing to lose) doesn’t care and sallies forth.