The State Children’s Health Insurance Program was supposed to be the MVP of various health care policy initiatives in 2007. SCHIP reauthorization, featured widely in conferences, at meetings, and on the Health Affairs Blog, had broad, bipartisan support uniting very strange bedfellows of all political stripes. Nonetheless, two bills for reauthorization were vetoed, and a modest extension keeps the […]

Almost 17 percent of black children and 20.5 percent of Latino children in the United States live in “double jeopardy,” meaning that they live in both poor families and poor neighborhoods, according to research released today in the March/April issue of Health Affairs. In contrast, only 1.4 percent of white children live in double jeopardy.
In […]

Perhaps the signal event in federal health policy for 2007 is the failure to reauthorize the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). On Wednesday, December 13, President Bush vetoed the second version of the SCHIP reauthorization.

Over the past two months, highly read posts on the Health Affairs Blog looked at President Bush’s veto of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), a new report from the Congressional Budget Office on health spending trends, analysis of the number of uninsured Americans, and discussion of health reform solutions. Posts with a global […]

On Thursday, November 1, 2007, at the Health Affairs 25th anniversary health policy summit, Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) were presented awards for their leadership in bipartisan policy making in health care. In conjunction with their awards, the senators pledged their continued dedication to the cause of bipartisanship, particularly in regard […]

Just when it looked as if the debate over the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) couldn’t get any more agonizing, some of the same folks who brought us the devastating RAND 55 percent study four years ago are back with the dismal news that children, on average, receive recommended treatment in only 46.5 percent […]

Secretary of Health and Human Services Mike Leavitt has recently launched a blog. Today he offers the administration’s view on the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) reauthorization bill, which President Bush recently vetoed. 
Sec. Leavitt says that he writes his own posts. So far he’s blogging about once a week. Here’s an excerpt from today’s […]

It’s the morning after President Bush’s veto of the reauthorization of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). How did a program that started out with such bipartisan support become the health policy wonk equivalent of all-out war? Today’s Health Wonk Review takes a look across the blogosphere for some health policy soul-searching.
Politico blogger Ben […]

The most-read post of September on the Health Affairs Blog was by Linda Aiken on Pennsylvania’s new legislation which focuses on tapping nurses and other health professionals to address health reform issues. Aiken, the Claire M. Fagin Leadership Professor of Nursing and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, also has the most-read blog post for […]

Many of Washington policymakers and health policy experts are returning from August vacations to find that the month was not as quiet as expected. On Friday evening, August 17th, the Administration issued a major new directive on children’s health coverage that effectively eliminates SCHIP for children above 250 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL), […]

While the last two weeks in August used to be a rather somnolent period in Washington, it seems like the participants in the SCHIP debate missed the vacation memo. The events of those weeks, the new CMS guidance on current SCHIP implementation and the release of the Census Bureau Report on Income, Poverty, and Health […]

Now that it’s September and Congress is back in session, it’s time to prepare for the September policy showdown on reauthorization of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). Last month Health Affairs Blog invited policy experts with wide-ranging views to set out the hot-button issues–such as the tobacco tax funding mechanism–and explain the politics. These posts […]

This morning the U.S. Census Bureau announced that the number of uninsured Americans jumped to 47 million in 2006, up from 44.8 million in 2005. In percentage terms, there were 15.8 percent of Americans without insurance in 2006, up from 15.3 percent in 2005. This also represents the sixth year in a row that the […]

The current SCHIP debate is about more than just children’s health coverage. Behind the rhetoric from both sides lies the struggle to define the future of health care in America. One side in the debate is using SCHIP (State Children’s Health Insurance Program) reauthorization to incrementally expand the role of government in the health care […]

In a wistful and wise editorial in the August 3 Washington Post, David Broder mourned what the SCHIP debate had become–an ugly polarizing event.
Many commentators have wondered how a bipartisan program passed during the waning years of the Clinton administration under a Republican-dominated Congress descended into an ugly scrimmage beset by cries of socialized medicine, […]

In SCHIP reauthorization, sound and fury surround the following question: What should be the highest income level for SCHIP-eligible children? The more important challenge facing policymakers, however, is covering low-income, uninsured children who already qualify for Medicaid or SCHIP, since these children comprise the bulk of uninsured youngsters. To reach them, SCHIP reauthorization needs to […]

Genevieve Kenney, a principle research associate at the Urban Institute, is a coauthor of this post. She is a nationally renowned expert on the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, Medicaid, and the broader coverage and access issues facing low-income children and their families.
It is now becoming a tradition that major legislation to expand […]

One of the more peculiar aspects of life in Washington D.C. is the politicization of policy problems, to the point that the political framing effort hopelessly distorts the matter at hand. The 2007 debate over the reauthorization of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program is turning out to be a classic example of this phenomenon.
SCHIP […]

Congress and the White House are poised for a showdown over reauthorization of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program before the program expires on September 30, with both houses having passed legislation that the president has vowed to veto.
While President Bush and majorities in both houses of Congress support reauthorization of SCHIP, each offers […]

As the debate surrounding reauthorization of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program continues, Health Affairs is publishing a series of articles on the program. In an article published July 26 (free access for two weeks), Benjamin Sommers of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston reports that one-third of all children who were uninsured in 2006 […]