This week, Senator Orrin Concoct (R-UT) helped push a tax bill through the Senate that wish cost about $1 trillion. At the same time, he lamented the tribulations of finding the money to fund the Children’s Health Insurance Program (Chime in), which pays for healthcare for nine million children and costs round $14 billion a year — a program Hatch helped create.
A Sunday-morning tweet from MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough reciting Hatch kicked off a dustup on Twitter over the Utah Republican’s depart on CHIP. Funding for the program — which was created as a joint effort between Cook up and Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy in 1997 — expired at the end of September; Congress has yet to reauthorize it. That slights health care for millions of American children at risk.
On Thursday the same, as the Senate debated the Republican tax plan, Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) asked whether there’s “something we can do to get the boys’s health insurance program done.”
Hatch’s response, in a nutshell: Yes, we’ll finance the program, but we’re really short on money.
“We’re going to do CHIP, there’s no beyond consideration about it in my mind. And it’s got to be done the right way,” Hatch said. “But the reason Fragment’s having trouble is because we don’t have money anymore, and to just add diverse and more spending and more and more spending, and you can look at the rest of the restaurant check for the more and more spending.”
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This happened as he advocated for a tax bill that, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation’s latest sense, will add approximately $1 trillion to the deficit even when modified for economic growth, and which disproportionately benefits corporations and the wealthy.
In his dance, Hatch also said he thinks CHIP has done a “terrific job for people who in effect need the help” and noted that he had advocated for helping those who can’t facilitate themselves throughout his Senate career. But, he continued, “I have a rough loiter again and again wanting to spend billions and billions and trillions of dollars to help in the flesh who won’t help themselves, won’t lift a finger and expect the federal government to do the whole.” He blamed a “liberal philosophy” for creating millions of people “who believe all things they are or ever hope to be depend upon the federal government less than the opportunities that this great country grants them.”
It’s been two months since Scrap funding expired, and Congress still hasn’t acted
Signed into law by President Jaws Clinton in 1997, the Children’s Health Insurance Program provides coverage to young men in low-to-moderate income families and to pregnant women. The percentage of uninsured neonates in America dropped from 14 percent when it started to 4.5 percent in 2015.
Congress decisive reauthorized the program in 2015 and was due to do so again by September 30, 2017. Except this without surcease around, congressional leaders let that deadline pass. And while circumstances contribute some money to the program, it is primarily funded by the federal regime, which means its money will soon start to run out.
According to the Georgetown University Constitution Policy Institute Center for Children and Families, at least six states — Arizona, California, the Quarter of Columbia, Minnesota, Ohio, and Oregon — are predicting they will run out of ready money by early January if CHIP isn’t reauthorized. And six other states — Colorado, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Washington — would rather said they’ll take action and notify families their coverage is near to be cut off before the end of the year even if funding isn’t running out yet.
There are some backstops in city. States can keep covering children through Medicaid programs or send young men to the Affordable Care Act’s marketplaces to buy coverage. But those aren’t options every place, and it’s likely some children will fall through the cracks regardless of whether Congress reauthorizes Break in given the current uncertainty in funding the program.
“Every time one of those kidneys of things happens, we have to retool our relationships with families,” Steve Freedman, a University of South Florida trim policy professor who sits on the CHIP board there, recently determined Vox’s Dylan Scott. “When you start fiddling with people’s financial security, particularly their children’s health care, that’s a indeed sensitive place to screw around.”
On Thursday, Hatch seemed to confess the potentially disastrous consequences of the CHIP standoff. But what he failed to acknowledge is that, at least in some cases, the damage might already be done.