Right now, a draft of a letter informing thousands of Virginia parents that their kids might lose their health coverage just after the holidays is sitting on Linda Nablo’s desk. “People are going to panic,” Nablo, who is the chief deputy director of the Virginia Department of Medical Assistance Services, told me. “It’s going to cause mass confusion. It’s going to be an increase in the lack of trust in government, that government will do what it says it will do. People will lose their managed-care plans. They’ll lose their provider. It’s going to cause chaos.”
Nablo and her colleagues have drafted the letter because, for more than 50 days, Congress has failed to reauthorize funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP, a federal-state initiative that covers about nine million lower-income kids. Within weeks, states will start running out of money, leaving them scrambling to patch the holes in their budgets or forced to suspend their programs and drop coverage—as Virginia expects it would have to do. “Every day that goes by, we’re getting increasingly concerned,” Nablo said. “Nobody ever anticipated we’d be in this situation. We’re taking very concrete steps as if we’re going to shut this program down.”
Hill staffers insist and the states anticipate that Congress will pass new funding for CHIP in the coming weeks. But the situation has left doctors fuming, administrators bewildered, parents frightened, and politicians shocked. Even if no states end up running out of money and no kids end up losing coverage, the dithering has already diverted state resources, degraded state programs, and sapped state coffers, and Congress’s dysfunction has pushed the stability of an effective, respected program with bipartisan support into doubt.
Created by the late Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts and Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, CHIP covers kids whose families earn too much to qualify for Medicaid but do not have employer-sponsored plans or cannot afford coverage on the Obamacare exchanges. The program works: It is credited with helping to cut the uninsured rate for kids by more than half, while also reducing hospitalization rates, improving kids’ educational outcomes, and bolstering their families’ economic well-being. It is also a safety-net rarity in today’s polarized Washington, with strong and deep bipartisan support.
