ALL Kids good for the next 6 years

Published 6:30 am Thursday, January 25, 2018

Parents across Alabama are breathing a huge sigh of relief now that Congress has finally voted to reauthorize the Children’s Health Insurance Program for another six years as part of a spending bill to reopen the government.

ALL Kids, the Alabama insurance program for low- or middle-income families, is part of the federally-funded CHIP program. ALL Kids provides coverage for over 83,000 children and comes at an annual cost of $200 million.

Created two decades ago by both Democrat and Republican lawmakers, CHIP has dramatically reduced the number of uninsured children in America. In Alabama alone, ALL Kids has reduced the percentage of uninsured children from 20 percent in the late 1990s to just over 2 percent today.

When CHIP ran out of funding at the end of September last year, Congress failed to pass a bill that would continue to fund the program. This left states like Alabama scrambling to keep kids insured.

The situation became so grim by mid-December that the Alabama Department of Public Health began printing insurance cancellation notices and seriously considered halting enrollment.

Congress, however, threw the program a bone Dec. 21, passing a temporary funding patch that promised to keep ALL Kids alive until mid-March.

Cathy Caldwell, the director of the CHIP program at the ADPH, said they happily shredded the letters when they received news of the extension.

“But we were still in limbo,” she said.

And there they remained until Jan. 22, when Congress passed a bill that revived funding for CHIP for the next six years.

“This is what we have been waiting for. We are very excited, and it feels like a huge weight has been lifted off of us,” Caldwell said.

Why Congress finally came through

When Republicans proposed to extend CHIP last fall, their bill included cuts to Medicare and the health care law, better known as “Obamacare.” Democrats refused to support it.

In mid-January, a second Republican proposal to fund the CHIP program was again met with resistance by Democrats because it did not address the continuation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Initially, Senate Democrats insisted that CHIP funding be tied to the immigration issue, leading to a government shutdown.

Senate Democrats eventually agreed Jan. 22 to a three-week budget extension of the federal budget, which included a six-year extension of CHIP and the promise to deal with DACA down the road.

CHIP to save money in long run

Caldwell also pointed to a recent statements released by the Congressional Budget Office that basically said renewing the CHIP program could actually save the federal government money.

“If CHIP disappeared, most parents would still not be able to afford health insurance through their employers — if it’s even available — so they would to turn to the marketplace,” Caldwell said.

The Republican tax bill passed at the end of December repealed the health care law’s individual mandate, which for varying reasons, has caused Obamacare premiums to soar. If a low- or-middle income wage earner were to insure their child through Obamacare, they would qualify for a sizable tax credit. Combine that credit with millions of other tax credits, and, over time, the CBO believes that Obamacare coverage would end up being far more costly than CHIP.

Caldwell said that she was also happy to see that ALL Kids will receive a 100-percent federal funding match for the next two years. She said that number will drop to approximately 90 percent in its third year and then will go back to the traditional 80-percent federal match in the final three years of the bill.