February 14, 2007
Fun with CHIP
Nothing better than losing money... simply because you didn't allocate it.
Before the 2003 Texas Legislature cuts, the Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC) projected a funding shortfall to occur sometime between late 2006 and 2008. The legislative changes prevented this from happening, but it also meant that the state lapsed SCHIP funds because it did not spend all that the federal government had allocated. The excess, of course, was returned and redistributed to those states that had spent their allotments.Next month, some $20 million is scheduled to lapse in Texas. These funds added to the previous lapsed monies total more than $913 million. In other words, Texas has given away to other states more than three times the $288 million in federal SCHIP funds provided the state in 2005 to run the CHIP program.
Congress is scheduled to debate the reauthorization of the block grant sometime this year. If Congress provides only enough money to support current enrollment, hundreds of thousands of children will still miss out on health care assistance. Texas needs to make very effort to counter the possible attempts to reduce the SCHIP allocation based on the state's current enrollment.
So, instead of doing the right thing and keeping kids insured, they are forcing the parents to instead take their kids to the emergency room for routine care. That's saving a dollar by spending four. Yet another example of Republican math the ends up costing taxpayers more.
Posted by mcblogger at February 14, 2007 07:07 PM
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