Sen. Jay Rockefeller
This week, a Senate hearing on the Children's Health Insurance Program reauthorization highlighted a
major glitch in the Affordable Care Act that could result in millions of kids losing coverage next year. Congressional gridlock and hostility to Obamacare could end up
killing funding for the program that provides health insurance to about 8 million children.
These children would fall into a new coverage gap if CHIP is allowed to expire. Their families don't qualify for Medicaid, but might not be able to afford full family coverage with private insurance. The Affordable Care Act should have addressed this problem, but it doesn't because a key provision was poorly written. As the law stands, if a parent can get "affordable" health insurance through work, they can't get a subsidy to purchase a plan on the exchange. A plan is deemed affordable if premiums are less than 9.5 percent of household income, but the problem is that's based on premiums for an individual plan, not more expensive family plans. Fast forward to this week's hearing:
Senator Jay Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia, and Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, have introduced bills that would extend federal funding for the program through 2019. But the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission, an advisory group, has recommended only a two-year extension, saying that would be long enough to address problems like the law’s family glitch. […] Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a conservative economist and former head of the Congressional Budget Office, pointed out in testimony that the program “now resides in an insurance landscape that is very different than the one it was created in.”
For this reason, he said that “a straight reauthorization is not the best decision” and that “redundancies in coverage should be considered when making funding decisions.”
Rockefeller and Waxman have very good reasons for pushing for a five-year extension, particularly since both of them are retiring this year, and their advocacy for the program will be ending. There's very little chance in the next two years that Republicans in the House will be willing to make the necessary fix to Obamacare and if Republicans take the Senate, that chance is reduced to basically zero. Holtz-Eakin is previewing what the Republican position will likely end up being—we can't afford it right now and Obamacare should cover these kids anyway, even though it clearly doesn't. If this very popular program ends, Republicans can use that to again point to how Obamacare is bad.
As Rockefeller said in the hearing, just because Republicans have supported the program in the past, that's no guarantee for the future. "You can't always count on something that has been bipartisan to continue to be bipartisan."