How Congress’s inaction has left children’s health program on life support
Dakota Flores sees a future for her children that she never had.
Tyler and Harmonie, both in middle school in San Antonio, Texas, are flourishing. Both are honor roll students, choir singers, and musicians. And they have a shot at going to college, something Ms. Flores was not able to do.
But Flores worries that future could be derailed by their chronic health conditions. Her children’s health insurance coverage, along with the coverage for an estimated 8.9 million other children around the country, could soon disappear after Congress allowed funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) to lapse at the end of September.
For the past 2-1/2 months, states have been funding the joint federal-state program out of their own pockets, but they are starting to run out of money. Most of CHIP’s funding is federal, so if Congress doesn’t reauthorize funding by the end of the year, the program will start shuttering in early 2018.
Last week, Colorado became the first state to send letters to CHIP families warning them that support might end in January. Texas has asked the federal government for $90 million to keep its program running through February. If it doesn’t get confirmation by the end of this week that the additional funds are coming, the state says it will have to send similar letters to its more than 400,000 CHIP families, with the letters arriving days before Christmas.
For Flores, a single mother of four in San Antonio, the stress and anxiety have been mounting. Tyler has been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder so severe he could not sleep at one stage. Next week she will be meeting with doctors to get a last-minute check-up for Harmonie, who has a chronic eye condition, and to discuss coverage options should CHIP fold next year. If her prescription changes and she doesn’t have insurance, she says, “I’d have no idea where we’re going to go from there.”
“I’m just a bundle of nerves, because they’ve come so far,” says the mom, who now says she’s the one who has trouble sleeping. “The way I see it is they’re the next generation, and you’re stopping our next generation from succeeding.”
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