Arnold Does The Right Thing On SCHIP

I've said a number of times that if the Governor was serious about health care reform, he needed to follow the lead of other Governors and demand that the President reverse his decision to both veto S-CHIP expansion and make it nearly impossible for states to help provide health care to as many children as possible by putting onerous new eligibility requirements on the states. I'm pleased to say that he has followed through on one of these goals, and today Schwarzenegger and Gov. Spitzer of New York write to the President.

The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is proposing new rules that will set Medicaid and state programs back forty years. These rules, which are being promulgated without proper review, impose eligibility standards that would both deny health care to vulnerable children and pregnant women and greatly restrict the flexibility of states to reach your administration’s stated goals of efficiently providing coverage. The rules must be withdrawn [...]

California and New York cover more than 1.4 million children and pregnant women using State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) funds – nearly one out of every four SCHIP recipients in the country. We have a long and productive relationship with CMS in leveraging SCHIP to innovatively provide maximum benefit with minimum resources.

We agree with your push for states to be a force for change in the delivery of health care to tens of millions of our fellow Americans who remain without meaningful coverage. But as you rally governors to do more to help fix our broken health care system, your administration has repeatedly modified existing Medicaid and SCHIP rules, harming states’ capacity to help you achieve our shared objectives.

The recently proposed SCHIP rules will reverse longstanding agreements with the states and reduce the number of children who receive health care. We strongly urge you to reconsider these recent policy changes, which simply diminish state flexibility.

Caring for children really isn't a Democratic or Republican issue. The Bush Administration wants to have it both ways, shirking the responsibility for health care onto the states while making it impossible for the states to carry out such a mission. The White House has an ideological obsession with not allowing this successful program to be expanded; then people might think they can actually receive health care from a government program they pay for in taxes. The horrors! Good for the Governor on this one.