The Betrayal of Trust for California's Children on Health Care

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Anthony Wright
Executive Director of Health Access California

Susan Brink at the LA Times has a lengthy overview of the SCHIP children's coverage crisis, from the point of view of one middle-class family that isn't eligible for children's coverage now, but their kids would be covered under the reform proposals by Governor Schwarzenegger and the legislative leadership, if the federal government gets around to funding the program.

More on the political side, there's an important article by Zachery Coile at the San Francisco Chronicle describing the awful choices that California has with regard to the SCHIP discussion: without a resolution in DC, California is on the brink of disenrolling hundreds of thousands of children from the current program.

As I point out in the article, this goes beyond the awfulness of denying children coverage for their check-ups and emergencies... this undoes ten years of outreach and enrollment efforts to build the program up to this point. This is a betrayal of trust... the whole point of insurance is to provide security, and that security is gone when you yank the insurance away. When the funds eventually come in, will we find those kids again? Why wouldn't those families be skeptical?

The only good news is that I think that this problem has a defined end date.

There's a good possibility that a deal could be worked out in the next few months between the President and Congress that provides the needed funds for SCHIP, especially if there's enough heat on the President, Republicans running for re-election, especially 15-or-so Republican Representatives that would provide the margin for a veto override.