Washington out millions for health care
President Bush’s veto of a bill expanding children’s health insurance means that Washington loses $28 million it had hoped to put toward children’s health coverage over the next year, said Jim Stevenson, a spokesman for the state’s Medicaid program. But unlike in some states, Washington children who have coverage now are in danger of losing it because of the veto, he said.
Gov. Chris Gregoire on Wednesday appealed to U.S. Rep. Doc Hastings, the state’s sole “no” vote in Congress. She asked him to buck “the partisan pressures you must have to support the President” and vote to override the veto.
Hastings has said he worries expanding coverage to middle-income children will hurt health insurers and edge the nation closer to “a Canadian-style, government-run health care system.”
The bill vetoed Wednesday also would have done away with a long-standing thorn in the side of Washington’s budget writers. The state was one of the first to start covering children up to 200 percent of the poverty level under Medicaid, at a time when most states only covered children in families earning half that. But when the federal government created SCHIP in 1997, it banned states from using the new program to cover kids already covered by Medicaid. Why that matters: the federal match for Medicaid is 50-50; for SCHIP it’s a more generous 65-35.
Lastly, the bill would have eased new federal rules that Gregoire says make it impossible for the state to offer coverage, as planned, for children in families earning up to 300 percent of poverty level in 2009. That expansion, shepherded through the Legislature this spring by state Sen. Chris Marr, D-Spokane, would allow a family of four earning nearly $62,000 a year to buy the state coverage for uninsured children.
But an Aug. 17 letter from the federal Department of Health and Human Services would derail that, Gregoire said Monday. Among other things, she said, the feds are insisting that states can only expand if they already cover 95 percent of children in families earning less than 200 percent of poverty level. It’s virtually impossible to get participation that high, Gregoire said.
Gregoire on Monday said she and several other governors will file a lawsuit against the new rules.