SCHIP edict harnesses New York
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| News Archive
| Topics: children, insurance, politics
The federal government has declined New York's request to expand SCHIP enrollment to families earning four times the federal poverty level (or roughly $81,000). Another 70,000 kids could be covered by New York's request which currently enrolls 88 percent of those eligible. The Bush administration's edict demands 95 percent enrollment, leading the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to assert, New York "has not demonstrated that its program operates in an effective and efficient manner with respect to the core population of targeted low-income children." The Bush administration says expanding SCHIP might crowd out for-profit private insurance companies, something to which it is ideologically opposed. As Jonathan Cohn writes in the New Republic, it's not as if SCHIP will become the equivalent of a mini-van for the middle-class.
